Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.
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A utility won’t take your job
♛ 21.07.2026 The Utility Was Never the Story Read Time: 8 Minutes Hello In July 2026, a founder I follow posted that AI can ship 15 items to anyone in 4 weeks, so shipping proves nothing anymore. The real flex is knowing which one of the 15 matters, and having the discipline…
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Product shape is not a moat
♛ 14.07.2026 Shape vs Moat Read Time: 12 Minutes Hello How to Know If Your Company Survives the Day It Gets Copied The Three Engines framework, eight case studies, one forty-year-old counterexample, and the four tests I run before I believe any defensibility story. Over my career, I have sat in…
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Product Shape Is Not The Moat
Product shape is neither necessary nor sufficient. Where shape correlates with survival, the underlying causes are segment knowledge, workflow entrenchment, and a data loop. Shape is the visible surface of the moat, not the moat. I recently read an essay where the author’s argument goes like this. AI application companies…
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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…
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Ten positioning costumes
♛ 07.07.2026 The Positioning Industry Has One Disease Read Time: 6 Minutes Hello Two things before we dive into this week’s Digest. I wrote an article on How Language Formed — And Why Professional Vocabulary Collapsed I created a prompt that uncovers your blind spot and reveals your superpower. Drop it…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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How to Define Your ICP in One Sentence
The Refusal Test: one question that replaces frameworks, scoring models, and persona decks. I have spent twenty years reading companies from the outside: customer language, financial filings, hiring patterns, what they fund and what they kill. It started with my agency and later at a Big Four consulting firm (where…
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Fin: The Man Who Hated Bots Now Sells the Most Personal One
I have been following what Intercom, now Fin, has been building for years. Eoghan McCabe’s willingness to destroy a functioning business to rebuild it around a conviction is rare, and it deserves to be taken seriously. This analysis exists because one question keeps surfacing when I watch companies at this…
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The Report That Surveyed the Wiring
An autopsy of JKR x Kantar’s “Be Distinctive Everywhere: The Experience Edition” (2026) There’s a report going around. JKR and Kantar launched it at Cannes in June 2026, the same week Sharp and Ritson finally shared a stage. The headline is everywhere on LinkedIn: only 28% of brand equity is…
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