Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.
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Product Shape Is Not The Moat
Product shape is neither necessary nor sufficient. Where shape correlates with survival, the underlying causes are segment knowledge, workflow entrenchment, and a data loop. Shape is the visible surface of the moat, not the moat. I recently read an essay where the author’s argument goes like this. AI application companies…
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The Empirical Case That Marketing Never Owned Positioning
Six cases from the public record, the science on why the newest one won’t work, and a thirty-minute exercise called The Refusal Line that shows you who owns your position. For years I have watched companies fire their Chief Marketing Officer after a positioning failure, hire a replacement with a…
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How Language Formed — And Why Professional Vocabulary Collapsed
I went looking for something small and fell through the floor. The small thing was a question I couldn’t shake. How did we ever agree on what words mean? Not grammar, not spelling. The deeper thing underneath those. When I say “chair” and you picture a chair, some machinery is…
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Two decks that share a word and share nothing else
The word “positioning” describes two different disciplines. One is a language craft. The other is an operating model decision. They share a word and almost nothing else. The word alone is worth money: attach it to language work, and the price goes up without the work changing. I have watched…
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The End of Doing Your Own Banking
A POV on how retail and small business customers will manage money in North America over the next three to five years, and what it means for banks, challengers, and fintechs. The airline analogy that says everything Air Canada owns Aeroplan. It is Air Canada’s single most defensible customer relationship.…
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Alex Smith × April Dunford — one hour on positioning, taken apart line by line
An hour of two people who agree with each other, congratulating each other for disagreeing with people who aren’t in the room. What follows is what actually happened, not what they think happened. 1. The setup — what the conversation is announced as Alex Smith opens with a frame. He…
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How to Define Your ICP in One Sentence
The Refusal Test: one question that replaces frameworks, scoring models, and persona decks. I have spent twenty years reading companies from the outside: customer language, financial filings, hiring patterns, what they fund and what they kill. It started with my agency and later at a Big Four consulting firm (where…
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Fin: The Man Who Hated Bots Now Sells the Most Personal One
I have been following what Intercom, now Fin, has been building for years. Eoghan McCabe’s willingness to destroy a functioning business to rebuild it around a conviction is rare, and it deserves to be taken seriously. This analysis exists because one question keeps surfacing when I watch companies at this…
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The Report That Surveyed the Wiring
An autopsy of JKR x Kantar’s “Be Distinctive Everywhere: The Experience Edition” (2026) There’s a report going around. JKR and Kantar launched it at Cannes in June 2026, the same week Sharp and Ritson finally shared a stage. The headline is everywhere on LinkedIn: only 28% of brand equity is…
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Six Doors, One Room
I watched the brand growth debate over the past week. Six people walked up to the same empty room and stopped. The one who got closest got there thirty years ago. For a whole week, I read the same argument made by different people, and the same thing kept bothering…
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The Origin Story of Positioning
What Ries and Trout named in 1969, and what was already running underneath it Here’s the thing most people get wrong about positioning. They think it started in 1972. It didn’t. 1972 is when the word got famous. The thing the word points to is older than the word by…
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Belief to Position
I keep watching people position things from the wrong end, and it took me a while to see why it bothered me. They start with the words. What should we say? What word do we want to own? I understand the pull. Words are the part you can argue about…
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