Unreasonable Hospitality Your P&L Is Your Only Honest Positioning Statement Stop reading. Do this now. Pull up last year’s P&L. Find the line item for “client experience.” Not there? Now open your website. “We’re client-centric.” “True partners.” “Transformation-focused.” One of these documents is lying. Guess which one your clients believe? The Impossible Rise In 2010,…

Brand strategy doesn’t exist And if it does, it’s either redundant or delusional. This isn’t semantic nitpicking. It’s about a fundamental misunderstanding that costs companies billions and creates organizational dysfunction at the highest levels. What most people call “brand strategy” is one of two things: There’s no third option. No magical layer between your business…

Why Successful Founders Give Terrible Advice (And You Keep Following It) Successful founders are the worst people to take advice from. Not because they’re lying. Because they genuinely don’t know why they succeeded. And following their advice will kill your company at predictable rates. Watch how this plays out: A founder builds a billion-dollar company.…

Nouns for strategy. Verbs for execution. Why Enterprises Buy Copilot But Can’t Deploy It Microsoft reports that 70% of Fortune 500 companies have adopted Copilot. Salesforce announced $1.2 billion in AI revenue with 6,000+ Agentforce customers. By any sales metric, these companies are winning. So why did Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff admit in October 2025…

“Tiger” The day a dog became “Tiger” is one of my favourite stories, and today I’m sharing it with you. Years ago, at Northpoint Centre of Learning (Mumbai), visiting faculty Adi Pocha (ex-Creative Director Lintas; founder Squircle Productions) shared a story that permanently rewired my understanding of positioning. Imagine the first time in human history…

A car is not a car What the fuck is market sentiment? Market sentiment is perception. And perception isn’t driven by logic. It’s driven by emotion. Not your product. Not your revenue. Not your fundamentals. Perception of what you represent. Here’s the proof: Toyota produces 9.36 million vehicles annually. Prints money. Operating profit margins around…

WTF is Cloud? HOW FAKE POSITIONING EXPERTS WOULD HAVE KILLED “CLOUD” A Case Study in Why Copywriters Masquerading as Strategists Fail at Mental Territory Ownership THE BRIEF It’s 2005. You’re in a conference room with the world’s best “positioning experts.” Here’s what you hand them: “We have a new service. Instead of storing data on…

Mental Availability vs Postioning Byron Sharp gets credit for making marketers care about mental availability. But he’s created a new confusion: thinking availability equals positioning. They’re not the same thing. Mental Availability = Probability of being thought of in buying situations Positioning = Owning a specific concept in the mind Mental availability asks: “When someone…

Your GTM is backwards Note: Grant’s post about choosing between “rabbits” (many small customers) and “whales” (a few large enterprises) perfectly illustrates how even smart people can confuse tactical distribution choices with strategic positioning. He thinks he’s describing how to choose your go-to-market strategy, but he’s actually documenting symptoms while missing the disease (the causality flows opposite to…

Personal brand garbage Sarah spent $15,000 on a “personal brand consultant” last year. New headshots. New website. New LinkedIn banner. Bio full of adjectives: “transformational, empowering, innovative.” Six months later, her team still saw her the same way: the micromanager who panics before deadlines. Sarah made three fatal errors that everyone makes about identity: The…

The mammalian brain Most brands chase the wrong thing. They spend millions on awareness campaigns. Then wonder why sales stay flat. They pivot to relevance. “We need to be more relevant to Gen Z!” Still, nothing moves. Here’s what they miss: Awareness and relevance are Level 1-2 games. Ownership is Level 3-4. And your mammalian…

Boring website Why Boring Businesses Win Despite Bad Marketing And What SaaS & AI Startups Can Learn Before Their Burn Rates Burn Them Out Most companies don’t fail because of bad messaging. They fail because they confuse messaging with positioning. There’s a big difference between what your website says and how your business actually works.…