Why Clients Don’t Buy Because They Understand You Before you dive into this week’s Digest, here are two other articles I published last week worth exploring. 1. Origins of Positioning 2. The decade-long debate between Ritson and Sharp Now, back to our scheduled programming. Buyer Experience Design From Order-Taker to Trusted Advisor Why the gap…

Words speak louder than words Before you dive into this week’s Digest, here are three other articles I published last week worth exploring. Surveys are slop Belief to position Build with AI Enjoy the words below. The difference between the sentence you can sell and the decisions that move a market. Words speak louder than…

The Adult Table A lot of new faces this month, so a note. I have been doing this work for 20 years, and I have never once called myself an expert. Every room I walk into picks a label for me. Creative director in one. Sales coach in another. Strategy guy. Thinker. Designer. The only…

The Bell, Violin & Pretender Before we dive into this week’s Digest, I’d like to share something I’ve been working on for the last year. I’ve read the positioning of 31 companies from the outside in. 1. The Noun Elon Musk Left Out of the SpaceX S1: A Positioning Read of the June 12 IPO…

The Prancing Horse A happy accident. Something went sideways in the Mailchimp automation overnight — so today’s newsletter is going out a day early. Rather than fight it (or worse, clog your inbox with a second email tomorrow), I’m just leaning into it. You get everything in one shot, today. So here’s the deal: The…

The Best Product Does Not Win Before we get into today’s topic, two pieces from this week are worth a few minutes of your time. The first is a positioning read of the SpaceX S-1, three weeks before the largest IPO in history. Five customer bases describing five different companies, and one noun the label…

Does Your Company Have a Position or Just Talks Like It Does? The two-debt diagnostic I run before I take any positioning engagement, and the five-step protocol that retires the debt once you have found it. For two decades, I have worked on positioning across the full range of company contexts, from Fortune 50 enterprises and…

The intelligence layer every research tool is missing Two things this week. A Gravity Report on Cloudflare, and a chart I drew to explain why reports like it can exist in the first place. Both sit on the same idea. Most of what executives call “market intelligence” is performed for an audience. The interesting layer…

The 72-Point Lie In 2005, Bain surveyed 362 companies. 80% of executives said their company delivered a superior customer experience. 8% of their actual customers agreed. The gap is 72 points. It is the most quoted statistic in customer experience consulting. It is also the most ignored. I keep coming back to it. Twenty years…

Homepage ‘positioning’ scam Today’s digest stems from two earlier posts: The $50B Homepage Optimization Scam Destroying B2B and The 2.35% Reality of B2B Websites. If you haven’t read them, here’s what they established. B2B companies spent roughly $50 billion on website optimization last year. 9% of buyers consider vendor websites reliable. 84% of B2B sales start…

One Crash, Millions of Flights, The Math Is Fine Imagine an Airline CEO: One Crash, Millions of Flights, The Math Is Fine There is a sentence no airline CEO has ever said out loud, at least not while keeping their job: “We only had one crash last year. Millions of flights landed safely. Statistically, we’re…

Does AI recommend your brand? Not “does AI know about your brand?” Knows and recommends are different things. I ran Notion through 5 AI engines this week. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI, Grok. Five real buyer questions across all five. Notion appeared in 9 of 25 responses. Here’s the part that should worry every product…