Category: Positioning
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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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Alex Smith × April Dunford — one hour on positioning, taken apart line by line
An hour of two people who agree with each other, congratulating each other for disagreeing with people who aren’t in the room. What follows is what actually happened, not what they think happened. 1. The setup — what the conversation is announced as Alex Smith opens with a frame. He is the “no bullshit strategy”…
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Six Doors, One Room
I watched the brand growth debate over the past week. Six people walked up to the same empty room and stopped. The one who got closest got there thirty years ago. For a whole week, I read the same argument made by different people, and the same thing kept bothering me each time. Not the…
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The Origin Story of Positioning
What Ries and Trout named in 1969, and what was already running underneath it Here’s the thing most people get wrong about positioning. They think it started in 1972. It didn’t. 1972 is when the word got famous. The thing the word points to is older than the word by a long way. Confuse the…
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Belief to Position
I keep watching people position things from the wrong end, and it took me a while to see why it bothered me. They start with the words. What should we say? What word do we want to own? I understand the pull. Words are the part you can argue about in a room and walk…
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Your P&L Is the Only Positioning Statement
Let me start with the sentence that gets me in trouble. Your P&L is the only positioning statement your company has ever written. I don’t mean the number at the bottom. I mean the pattern underneath it. Where the money actually went. Who you actually hired. What you actually refused to build. Read that pattern,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…