Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.
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How and why people buy?
♛ 30.06.2026 Why Clients Don’t Buy Because They Understand You Read Time: 8 Minutes Hello Before you dive into this week’s Digest, here are two other articles I published last week worth exploring. Origins of Positioning 2. The decade-long debate between Ritson and Sharp Now, back to our scheduled programming. Buyer…
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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…
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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…
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Words > Words
♛ 23.06.2026 Words speak louder than words Read Time: 8 Minutes Hello Before you dive into this week’s Digest, here are three other articles I published last week worth exploring. Surveys are slop Belief to position Build with AI Enjoy the words below. The difference between the sentence you can sell…
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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…
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Surveys are slop
Surveys are slop because they ask people to describe their own behaviour, and people cannot do this accurately. The instrument and the thing it claims to measure are structurally incompatible. A survey lives entirely in the slow, rational, narrating part of the mind. Behaviour is driven by the fast, emotional,…
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What positioning work looks like
♛ 16.06.2026 The Adult Table Read Time: 16 Minutes Hello A lot of new faces this month, so a note. I have been doing this work for 20 years, and I have never once called myself an expert. Every room I walk into picks a label for me. Creative director in…
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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…
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Build with AI
Everyone wants the tool list. Which models, which prompts, which stack. I keep wanting to walk people back to the part that has nothing to do with tools, because that’s the part that built any of this. The order matters, so let me reflect back on it. It started with…
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Ninety Percent of What, Exactly — On the difference between copying a survey and predicting a sale
TLDR: Scientists taught a robot to fill out surveys like a human. The internet heard “robots can predict what you’ll buy!” and stampeded. Nobody checked what anyone actually bought. People in surveys say things they never do. The robot copied the saying part. The herd sharing the headline never read…
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Easy to Find vs. Worth Choosing
On the difference between getting considered and getting paid. Most of the people arguing about how brands grow are having two different conversations at once, and almost none of them know it. One camp says brands grow by being easy to find: easy to remember, easy to buy, present in…
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The Bell, Violin and 31 Positioning Reports
♛ 09.06.2026 The Bell, Violin & Pretender Read Time: 6 Minutes Hello Before we dive into this week’s Digest, I’d like to share something I’ve been working on for the last year. I’ve read the positioning of 31 companies from the outside in. 1. The Noun Elon Musk Left Out of…
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