Category: Your Business is Your Brand
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The Bifurcation Problem
Why consumer-loved companies lose their identity on the way to IPO. The moment a beloved product hires a “B2B CMO,” a clock starts ticking. Not toward growth but fracture. Not visibly or immediately. But the fracture is there, and it widens. There’s a pattern hiding in plain sight. The products people love most, the ones…
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The $108 Billion Word That Broke Strategy
Consulting firms needed differentiation. Academics needed publications. Corporations needed org charts. MBA programs needed career tracks. And “brand” needed to pay for all of it. This is the story of how one word got a hundred jobs, and why most of them shouldn’t exist. The Word That Launched a Thousand Frameworks The word “brand” entered…
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Harvey AI: The $8 Billion Position Nobody Has Named
A Note Before We Begin: I wrote this because I admire what Harvey is building. I’ve been following Winston Weinberg’s content, watching how the company moves, and studying the decisions they’ve made over the past three years. There’s something happening here that’s worth understanding more deeply. This analysis isn’t a criticism. It’s an attempt to…
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How to fix your ‘brand’ in 1 day
Note before we begin: Dan Koe’s article “How to Fix Your Entire Life in 1 Day” got 90 million views on X. When I read it, I understood why. Also, some envy ensued. LOL! Dan’s core thesis is that you aren’t where you want to be because you aren’t the person who would be there.…
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Context isn’t the preface. It’s the work.
Most bad decisions don’t come from a lack of intelligence. They come from skipping context. You’ve seen it. Someone asks a question that sounds clear: “Should we do product-led growth?”“Should we hire an enterprise seller?”“Can you help sharpen our marketing story?” Within minutes, smart people start handing out solutions. That’s the moment you should get…
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The “Brand Positioning” Problem: Why Two Words Reveal a Fundamental Misunderstanding
The Tell Two words that reveal you don’t understand positioning: “brand positioning.” This isn’t pedantry. It’s diagnostic. The phrase inverts causality, conflates two distinct phenomena, and reveals a conceptual confusion that has cost companies billions in misdirected strategy work. When someone says “brand positioning,” they’re typically doing one of three things: using one word to…
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Lovable: What the Fastest-Growing Software Company Actually Owns
A Note Before We Begin: I wrote this because I genuinely admire what Anton Osika and the Lovable team have built. I’ve been watching their journey, the social content, the product decisions, and the speed of execution. What they’ve accomplished in eighteen months is extraordinary by any measure. This analysis comes from a place of…
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Zoom’s S-1: The Gap Between What You Prove and What You Claim
How Positioning Language Shapes Market Valuation — And What Zoom Left on the Table An S-1 isn’t just a legal document. It’s a positioning claim to capital markets. It’s where you tell investors what mental territory you own, and they decide what that ownership is worth. Your product tells one story. Your metrics tell another.…
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How do I create a position?
The position you think you have isn’t the position you actually own Most companies have it backwards. They sit in conference rooms crafting positioning statements, testing taglines, building messaging frameworks. They hire agencies to help them “craft their positioning.” They run workshops to align on “brand positioning.” Then they wonder why nothing sticks. The problem isn’t…
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Wake Up, Neo
The Tax You Didn’t Know You Were Paying Every Canadian bank, from the giants to the slickest fintech, has built its business on a single bet: you won’t leave. Not because you love them. Not because they’re giving you a great deal. But because leaving is annoying. Think about what switching banks actually involves. You’d…
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Position Is Not an Opinion: The Neuroscience of What Actually Happens in Your Customer’s Brain
Most positioning conversations happen in conference rooms. Executives debate. Consultants facilitate. Post-its accumulate. Everyone leaves with an opinion about what the company’s position should be. Here’s the problem: position isn’t an opinion. Position isn’t what you decide in a workshop. It isn’t what you write on a slide. It isn’t what your leadership team agrees…
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Why “Just Do It” Actually Works: The Neuroscience of Positioning Done Right
Three words. Coined the night before a presentation. Inspired by a convicted murderer’s last words before a firing squad. “Just Do It” shouldn’t have worked. And yet, it’s become one of the most recognized phrases in commercial history. Nike’s market share jumped from 18% to 43% in the decade following its 1988 launch. The tagline…