Category: Your Business is Your Brand
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Stuck is not loyal
Why banks mistake learned helplessness for loyalty, and what changes when leaving gets easier. Ask a bank why its customers stay and you will hear words like trust, relationship and loyalty. Ask the customers, and you may hear something else. “My paycheque goes there.”“Our mortgage is with them.”“We opened the joint account when we got…
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The purchase does not prove you are the “only” option
“Be different. Own your category. Become the only choice.” This advice carries a familiar promise: find what makes your business unique, make that difference clear, and customers will choose you. The appeal is easy to see. Building a business is hard. Competition creates doubt. Being the “only” seems to offer a way out. But it…
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When the company becomes more important than the customer
I don’t find “we’re customer-centric” very convincing. I want to know what happens when serving a customer gets in the way of hitting a target. That’s where I would look for the truth about a business. Imagine you run a support team. You want customers to spend less time on the phone, so you start…
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What Nike’s CEO Failed to Understand
Positioning, capital allocation and the cost of getting the business wrong In March 2024, Nike’s chief financial officer described the mistake with unusual clarity. Matt Friend said the company had been “more focused on trying to achieve a mix of marketplace targets than we have on serving consumer demand where the consumer is shopping.” Read…
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Ramp: The Best Experience Is the One You Don’t See
Ramp, Eric Glyman, and the position they built by accident and never named A note before we begin: I have been watching Ramp for a while now, and I think highly of what Eric Glyman and his co-founders have built. Getting a finance product to the point where customers describe it with relief takes years…
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The One Room Where You Still Believe Words
Most of us learn a simple rule before we can read: when words and actions clash, children often take their cue from what adults do. You can say “be gentle” in your calmest voice while you slam the cupboard, but the slam is the stronger lesson. You can tell them to sit still at dinner…
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Simile’s $2 billion raise: The CERN of Saying Things
TLDR: I read the study behind Simile, the AI startup that just raised $200 million to simulate human beings. The founders interviewed 1,000 people for 2 hours each and built AI agents that fill out surveys the way those people would. Their own paper grades the copies against survey answers and says so, carefully. The…
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“We left about a billion dollars off the table.”
Patrice Louvet runs Ralph Lauren. That sentence is his, from a 44-minute interview about the brand, and he delivers it the way other CEOs report a record quarter. A billion dollars of real revenue, real customers holding real money, and the company walked away on purpose. Every positioning conversation happens on one side of a…
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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 better résumé, and expect the…
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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 running that neither of us…
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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 CEOs spend six figures on…
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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. On Point Loyalty’s 2026 ranking…