Setting your position

A position is a set of decisions, not a document.

Most positioning work ends in a deck that describes the company well and commits it to nothing. You can tell, because two people on the leadership team still describe the customer differently, and sales still tells a different story from the website.

A position is useful only when it closes off options. Choosing who you're for means choosing who you're not for. Choosing what you stand for means some features stop leading the story. Those are leadership calls, and they're why we make them with the leadership team in the room, not hand them a finished answer.

Start with evidence from the present.

The first input is what's already true. We talk to customers, to prospects who chose someone else and to the sales team, and we look at the competitor you lose to most and why. We read the objections sales hears every week and the questions prospects ask before they buy.

This tells you what the market believes about you today. It also shows the proof you already have and haven't used, which is often the fastest win in the whole engagement.

Then look at where the market is going.

A position built only on the present ships into a market that has already moved. So before anyone commits, we look ahead. We gather the early signals that something is shifting in your category, name the forces behind them, and sketch three or four ways the next few years could play out.

Then we test each candidate position against those futures. A position that only works in one of them is a bet. A position that holds in most of them is one you can build a launch, a website and a sales team around. This is the step most positioning skips.

Put options on the table, not one answer.

We bring two or three candidate positions to the leadership team, each with what it opens up, what it costs and which future it depends on. Leadership chooses. The choice is theirs because they're the ones who'll defend it in board meetings, sales calls and hiring decisions long after we're gone.

How it differs from market research and category design.

Market research describes the market as it is: its size, its competitors, today's demand. Positioning uses that and goes further, because it has to decide where you stand as the market moves.

Category design comes later. Naming a category and building the case for it only makes sense once you've chosen the territory worth claiming. Setting the position is that choice.

Neither tells you how buyers will actually decide once you reach them. That's its own read, and it comes from behavioral science in marketing.

Everything on one slide: the Awestruck Bearing™

The first thing a positioning engagement produces is the Awestruck Bearing™, one slide that lays out the brand, the value proposition and how it goes to market, all laddering up to a North Star. On a map, a bearing is your direction measured against north. The slide does the same job for the company.

From top to bottom it holds the North Star the company is working toward; the position, meaning who it's for and what it stands for in one sentence; the value proposition and the proof behind it; the voice and the few words that carry the brand; and the go-to-market, meaning the audiences, the offer and the channels.

It fits on one slide on purpose. A CEO can present it to a board, a new hire can learn the company from it, and every later asset can be checked against it. When a piece of work doesn't trace back to the Bearing, it's off-position.

Write it down so it can be used.

The Bearing is the summary. Behind it, we write the full position as a short set of rules: the audience, the position in one sentence, the proof behind each claim, the voice, and the words and claims to avoid. Your team works from it, your agencies work from it, and your AI tools load it before they draft anything. That's what turns a positioning decision into marketing that sounds like you at volume. See marketing with AI, with a person at every gate.

Signs your position needs work.

• Two people on your leadership team describe who you're for in different words.
• You can't say which competitor you lose to most, or why.
• Your positioning hasn't been revisited since your market last changed.
• Your sales team and your website use different proof.

If two or more of these sound familiar, take the positioning diagnostic. It takes four minutes and shows the gap that matters most. When there's a launch date involved, see how we run Go-to-Market.