The Positioning Industry Has One Disease

Two things before we dive into this week’s Digest.

1. I wrote an article on How Language Formed — And Why Professional Vocabulary Collapsed

2. I created a prompt that uncovers your blind spot and reveals your superpower. Drop it into your LLM chat and find out! Download.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

And it’s dressed up in ten different costumes.

Roger Martin caught one big mix-up: strategy is not planning. There’s a bigger one that’s been sitting under the positioning industry for forty years, in plain sight, paying salaries.

Positioning is not copywriting. Shocker, I know!

Sounds like a fight over words. It isn’t. It’s the fight over what the word is doing, and who gets paid for what.

Here’s the disease in one line: someone sells you the saying of a thing and prices it like the owning of a thing. Words priced like decisions. Logos priced like reputations. Job titles priced like disciplines. Answers to surveys priced like customer behaviour. That’s the whole con. Every version of the problem below is a costume on that same body.

The ten costumes sort into four layers. The disease itself. The people who spread it. The reasons buyers can’t see it. And the reflex when someone names it out loud. An epidemic is never just the germ. It’s the germ, the carriers, the blindness, and the immune response. This one is no different.