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 boss wants, so you give them boss-shaped outputs. You know what gets published, so you write publication-shaped papers.”

“But systems are always imperfect representations of reality. The gap between ‘what the system rewards’ and ‘what actually matters’ might be small, but it’s never zero.”

“Understanding a system gives you local optimization power but costs you global optimization power.”

That’s a clean description of what happened to positioning.

The positioning industry figured out the system. Consultants know what clients want to see. They know what deliverables look impressive. They know what a “positioning engagement” looks like. So they produce positioning-shaped things — messaging frameworks, brand pyramids, competitive matrices, positioning statements in fill-in-the-blank templates.

None of it is positioning.

The $500 billion deliverable machine
The global management consulting market crossed $500 billion in 2025. Some estimates, counting IT and digital advisory work, put it over a trillion.

A typical positioning engagement runs four to six weeks and costs between $15,000 and $50,000. The deliverables are remarkably standardized across firms: a competitive positioning matrix, a messaging hierarchy, a positioning statement in the format “For [target], [brand] is the [category] that [benefit] because [reason],” and a brand voice guide. Sometimes there’s a pyramid or an onion diagram.

Here’s what’s strange. If you strip the firm names off these deliverables and compare them, they’re almost interchangeable. The people selling differentiation can’t differentiate themselves. That should tell you something.

Martin Weigel, former Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, was blunt about it: organizations end up spending time fiddling with language instead of getting things done. He pointed to Nike as the counterexample. Despite being one of the most recognized companies on the planet, Nike has no brand onion, no brand key, no pyramid, no house, no temple, no shape of any kind. They have a belief. It shapes everything they do.

No consultant delivered that in a deck.

How we got here: when the proxy ate the thing
In 1975, British economist Charles Goodhart published an observation about monetary policy: any statistical measure will collapse once people start treating it as a target. The version most people know came later, distilled by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

This pattern shows up everywhere.

Wells Fargo wanted customers to hold eight products each. Why eight? Because it rhymed with “great.” Between 2002 and 2016, employees created 3.5 million unauthorized accounts. The target corrupted the behaviour it was supposed to track.

Google’s PageRank used inbound links as a proxy for content quality. The moment people figured that out, an entire industry sprang up to manufacture fake links. The proxy ate the thing it was measuring.

Fred Reichheld invented the Net Promoter Score to measure customer loyalty. By 2019, he was publicly frustrated, admitting he had no idea how badly people would manipulate it.

The pattern is always the same. Someone creates a useful proxy for something hard to measure. The proxy becomes the target. People get good at optimizing the proxy. The original thing it was supposed to represent no longer matters.

Now apply that to positioning.
Al Ries and Jack Trout formalized the concept in 1981. The original idea was clear: positioning is what you do to the prospect’s mind. You position in the mind, not on a slide. The point was owning a word or concept, Volvo owns safety, FedEx owns overnight, and that ownership exists in customers’ heads, not in your messaging doc or homepage.

That was the thing.

Then the industry created proxies. Positioning statements. Messaging frameworks. Brand architectures. Competitive matrices. Workshop exercises. These were tools meant to help achieve the thing.

But tools are measurable. The thing isn’t. You can tell whether a messaging framework is complete. You can’t easily tell whether you own mental territory. So over time, the tools became the product. The consultants optimized their work to produce excellent deliverables. The question stopped being “do customers associate a specific concept with this company?” and became “does the client like the positioning deck?”

The proxy ate the thing.

The gap between the deliverable and the achievement
Consider what positioning consultants actually deliver versus what positioning actually requires.

Salesforce didn’t become synonymous with cloud CRM because someone wrote a good positioning statement. Marc Benioff built the entire business model around software-as-a-service with no on-premise option. He secured 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE as their phone number. He staged theatrical protests at a competitor’s conference, with actors screaming in cages that represented “Enterprise Software Hell.” The position wasn’t in a document. It was in the business’s architecture.

HubSpot didn’t own “inbound marketing” because a consultant named the concept. Co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah coined the term, wrote a book about it, built a product specifically to serve the methodology, created HubSpot Academy with formal certifications, and launched an annual conference that grew to 26,000 attendees. Halligan said it plainly: You need an enemy. Theirs was outbound.

A positioning consultant delivers a document in four to six weeks. Salesforce’s positioning required building an entirely new software delivery model. HubSpot’s required writing a book, building an academy, and creating a conference. The deliverable and the achievement exist at different orders of magnitude.

Yvon Chouinard, accepting a Marketing Hall of Fame award for Patagonia, said the quiet part out loud: “Marketing at Patagonia is very simple. We just tell people who we are. I don’t have any agencies to thank up here.”

He then added, “When I die and go to hell, the devil is gonna make me Marketing Director of a cola company.”

Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad in the New York Times sold more jackets than ever. But as Chouinard noted, that wasn’t why they did it. Their positioning is the purest example of positioning-through-being. No consultant could design it because it required actually being Yvon Chouinard.

The expertise trap
If the consultants are smart and experienced, why does this keep happening? Because expertise is the problem.

Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein published a paper in 2009 identifying two conditions necessary for valid expert intuition: the environment must have stable, predictable patterns, and the expert must get rapid, clear feedback. Most strategic environments fail both tests. Kahneman’s blunt assessment: in low-validity environments, what looks like expert skill is often luck wrapped in confidence.

He proved the point. He analyzed eight years of performance data for about 25 investment advisers. The year-to-year correlation in their rankings was 0.01 — statistically zero. The firm was rewarding randomness as if it were ability. He showed these findings to the executives. They understood the math. Nothing changed.

Philip Tetlock’s twenty-year study of 284 experts making over 28,000 predictions found something worse. The experts most deeply embedded in a single framework, Tetlock called them “hedgehogs,” performed worst on long-term predictions within their own area of expertise. The deeper the domain knowledge, the worse the accuracy for these thinkers. Meanwhile, ordinary people trained in flexible reasoning outperformed intelligence analysts with classified information by about 30%.

There’s even a name for the cognitive mechanism. The Einstellung effect, demonstrated in a 2008 chess study, showed that expert chess players, when presented with problems containing both a familiar solution and a better, unfamiliar one, would fixate on the familiar pattern. Their expertise literally prevented them from seeing the superior option. Eye-tracking confirmed it: even when experts said they were looking for alternatives, their eyes kept returning to the known solution.

Abraham Maslow put it simply in 1966: if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Positioning consultants trained in specific frameworks see every client through those frameworks. The messaging hierarchy is the hammer. The positioning statement template is the hammer. The competitive matrix is the hammer. And every company looks like a nail.

A 2010 study in Organization Science analyzed 166 unsolved science challenges on InnoCentive.com. The finding: the further a problem was from a solver’s area of expertise, the more likely they were to solve it. A pharmaceutical company’s unsolved toxicology problem was cracked by a protein crystallographer. A food company’s chip-degreasing challenge was solved by a violinist from the New York Philharmonic who applied sound wave frequencies.

The outsider sees what the expert can’t. The founder, bumping into reality, sees what the positioning consultant, optimizing for the system, misses entirely.

The founders who never read the playbook
The strongest positions in business weren’t designed by positioning experts. They were built by founders who maintained direct contact with reality.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 when the company was nearly bankrupt. He didn’t hire a positioning firm. His internal speech was a positioning philosophy born from personal conviction: “We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” The “Think Different” campaign launched with no new product. Within twelve months, Apple’s stock price tripled.

James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes before his vacuum worked. The 5,126 failures weren’t a bug in the process. They were the positioning. By the time the product existed, it carried the proof of Dyson’s engineering obsession in its bones. Retailers rejected it. He sold direct. Within 18 months, he was the market leader in Britain at roughly three times the competitors’ prices.

Sara Blakely was a door-to-door fax machine saleswoman with $5,000 and no business training. She insisted Spanx be placed near shoes in stores, not in hosiery — based on nothing more than how she personally shopped. She chose a funny name when the industry demanded clinical language. Every choice defied conventional wisdom. Every choice worked.

Stewart Butterfield wrote a memo before Slack launched titled “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here.” The core line: “What we are selling is not the software product — we’re selling organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we’re able to build and ship.” A colleague recalled that the memo raised their eyeline. It wasn’t formatted as a deliverable. It was a shared understanding that aligned everything.

The pattern across all of these: real positioning required structural commitment (product architecture, business model, pricing, hiring, sales process) that went far beyond any document or workshop. These founders weren’t optimizing for the positioning system. They didn’t know there was one. They were trying to solve the problem at hand. And that direct contact with reality produced something authentic that no framework can manufacture.

The expensive problem with no name
There’s a concept in systems thinking from Donella Meadows. She ranked 12 places to intervene in a system, from lowest to highest leverage. Her observation: 99% of attention goes to the lowest-leverage interventions — adjusting parameters and numbers. The highest-leverage interventions involve shifting paradigms, changing the goal of the system, or transcending it entirely.

Most positioning work happens at the parameter level. Better words. Different taglines. Refined messaging hierarchies. These are the lowest-leverage moves in Meadows’ framework. The high-leverage work (changing what a company actually is, what concept it owns, how its business model proves that ownership) barely gets addressed.

Russell Ackoff, one of the fathers of systems thinking, put it more sharply: “The more right you do the wrong thing, the more wrong you become.” A better messaging framework for a company that doesn’t own any mental territory is just doing the wrong thing more efficiently.

Here’s what this means for you as a founder or CEO.
There’s a gap in most companies between what leadership thinks the market perceives and what the market actually perceives. Between the story you tell on earnings calls and the words customers use when they describe you to peers. Between the concept you believe you own and the concept (if any) that customers actually associate with your name.

This gap is invisible from the inside. You can’t read the label from inside the jar. And it doesn’t announce itself. It shows up eighteen to twenty-four months later as revenue decline, failed product launches, deals lost to competitors who seem objectively worse, and premium talent choosing to work elsewhere.

It’s the most expensive unmeasured variable in your business. And it doesn’t have a name in most executives’ vocabulary. Finance teams track revenue, margin, CAC, LTV, and churn. Nobody tracks the distance between internal positioning belief and external market reality.

That distance has a cost. When your market doesn’t associate a clear concept with your company, every sale requires more education. Sales cycles get longer. Win rates drop. Pricing power erodes. Marketing spend increases to compensate. And the instinct is always to treat these as operational problems (hire more reps, increase ad budget, refine the pitch deck) when the root cause is that the market doesn’t know what you mean.

What positioning actually requires
So what do you do?

Not what the industry tells you. Don’t start with a messaging workshop. Don’t hire someone to fill in a positioning statement template. Don’t build a brand pyramid. These are the positioning-shaped things the system rewards. They feel productive. They produce impressive deliverables. They change nothing.

Start with an honest answer to a hard question: if you removed your company name, your logo, and all your marketing copy, what single concept would customers associate with you?

If the answer is a product category (“they sell CRM software”), you don’t have positioning. You have a description.

If the answer is an adjective (“they’re innovative”), you’re competing on claims anyone can make. Adjectives are free. They require no proof and create no ownership.

If the answer is a noun, a concept that customers associate with you and essentially you alone, you might have the beginning of real positioning.

Volvo doesn’t claim to be safe. Volvo is safety. The noun belongs to them in customers’ minds. A competitor can’t take it by running ads that say “we’re safe too.” The concept is occupied territory.

The question after that is whether your business proves that concept through its structure. Not through its messaging — through its decisions. What have you said no to? What costly commitments have you made that only make sense if that concept is real? Does your product architecture, your pricing model, your hiring criteria, and your customer experience all point toward the same noun?

If the answer is yes, you don’t need a positioning consultant. You need to keep doing what you’re doing more intentionally.

If the answer is no, if there’s a gap between what you claim and what your business actually proves, then the work ahead isn’t a messaging exercise. It’s a business architecture exercise. It’s figuring out what you actually want to own, and then rebuilding the parts of the business that don’t align.

That’s harder than a workshop. It takes longer than six weeks. And no one can do it for you. But it’s the only version of positioning that competitors can’t copy with a better slide deck.

The test that matters
Henry Mintzberg wrote that you can search through all the strategic planning diagrams ever made (all the interconnected boxes, all the frameworks), and nowhere will you find one that explains how to synthesize experience into a novel strategy.

He was right. The creative act of deciding what you actually stand for, what concept you’re willing to bet the company on, what you’ll sacrifice to own that territory — that can’t be outsourced to a framework.

Chouinard said it best. “We just tell people who we are.”

The hard part isn’t the telling. It’s the knowing.

And the first step toward knowing is measuring the gap between what you think you are and what the market actually experiences. Because that gap (silent, compounding, invisible from inside) is where the real cost lives.

Not in your messaging. In your mirror.