Category: Positioning
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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…
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Positionmaxxing
The positioning industry has a positioning problem, and it’s costing you more than you think. A post on X recently stopped me cold. @Kpaxs wrote: “When you understand a system too well, you start optimizing for the system rather than for reality. You know what success looks like, so you pursue success-shaped things. You know what your…
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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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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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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…