Category: Your Business is Your Brand
-
What the Subway Took From Joshua Bell
On positioning, costly signals, and why the cheapest part of the craft is the part the market believes least. I keep coming back to the Joshua Bell story, and the longer I sit with it, the more I think it teaches the opposite of what it gets used to teach. You’ve probably heard it. On…
-
The Noun Elon Musk Left Out of the SpaceX S1: A Positioning Read of the June 12 IPO
A note before you read this: SpaceX has been operating for 24 years, and the part of the company most worth respecting is the part the financial press does not write about: the engineering culture, the cadence, the tolerance for failure as a method, and the willingness to ship at scales nobody else attempts. This…
-
The Costume Industry, Part III: Musk Did Not Kill Tesla. The Original Position Did Its Job.
On the difference between the fame that follows proof and the fame that replaces it. The Harvard Business Review just published a piece arguing that Tesla’s brand is now hostage to its CEO, and that the fix is for the company to manage Musk’s perception more carefully. The piece is built on a 2,200-respondent conjoint…
-
The Costume Industry, Part II: Why Positioning Work Almost Never Produces a Position
On the difference between vocabulary debt and decision debt. A week ago, I published an essay arguing that “personal brand,” “brand positioning,” “homepage positioning,” “product positioning,” and “brand marketing” are intellectually lazy terms that smuggle the wrong mental model into strategic work. The response was the most generous I have ever received for a piece…
-
The Costume Industry: Why “Personal Brand” (and Every Term Like It) Is Vocabulary Debt
There’s a particular kind of word that quietly does damage. It sounds professional. It travels well in meetings. It shows up in bios, decks, agency proposals, and LinkedIn posts. Nobody questions it because everyone uses it. And that’s exactly the problem. “Personal brand” is one of those words. So is “brand positioning.” So is “homepage…
-
Cloudflare built the internet’s Immune Layer
A note before you read this: I’ve been watching Cloudflare for a long time. What Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway built, and what the team continues to build, sits in a category of its own. Fifteen years of decisions that quietly hold up a meaningful portion of the open internet is not a…
-
You got the direction of travel wrong
Think Different. Just Do It. Red Bull Gives You Wings. Read them again. Notice what they’re about. Not one of these taglines describes a product. Apple doesn’t mention computers. Nike doesn’t mention shoes. Red Bull names itself but says nothing about energy drinks. Every one of them is about you. What you think. What you…
-
Nerdio: The Command Layer
A Note Before You Read: I’ve been following Nerdio and Vadim’s work the past few weeks, paying close attention to the content, the conference, the community, and the story being built in public. What you see here comes from genuine curiosity, not criticism. This analysis was assembled from publicly available sources: customer case studies, interviews,…
-
OpenAI: The Intelligence Utility
From Clarity to Gravity: OpenAI + Sam Altman A positioning analysis of the company that created a category, owns a product noun, and is searching for the concept underneath. A note before we begin. I wrote this analysis because I admire the work. OpenAI and Sam Altman have done something rare; they created a category…
-
Palantir: The Company That Owns a Concept It Rarely Names
From Clarity to Gravity: Palantir Technologies A positioning analysis of Palantir Technologies and CEO Alex Karp A Note Before We Begin: I have been watching Palantir closely for a while now. The work Alex Karp and the team have built over twenty-two years is genuinely remarkable, and so is the way Karp talks about it.…
-
The ingredient nobody’s checking
In 2021, a global professional services firm spent $14 million on a brand transformation. New visual identity. New messaging architecture. New brand guidelines distributed across 47 offices. They commissioned research before the launch. Prompted awareness was strong. Sentiment scores came back positive. The positioning statement (something about trusted expertise and human-centred outcomes) tested well in…
-
Glossier: The Brand That Proved Everything and Said Nothing — Until It Started Talking
From Clarity to Gravity: Glossier Emily Weiss spent four years building trust before she sold a single product. She woke at 4 a.m. to write a beauty blog while working at Vogue, funded with $700 of her own money. She collected 11 rejections from VCs before Kirsten Green said yes. When the first four products…