It comes down to just one thing. Their ability to make decisions.

If the leader is capable of leaning in, fully examining decisions, and making them with conviction, positioning work goes well.

If the leader wants to lean back and let positioning work happen to them, or flit from decision to decision based on the latest sales call or investor meeting, then positioning work doesn’t go well.

This is true regardless of the product, the market, or the circumstances.

Why decisions are the unit that matters

Every action in a company is an echo of a decision.

Businesses, products, teams, initiatives. Everything from the inception of the company itself to the Slack message someone sent you two minutes ago happened because someone decided it should.

Positioning is what I’d call a meta-decision. A concentration of major strategic turning points to clarify the thinking that defines how a company addresses its market.

But the “positioning industry” (the thousands of agencies, solo consultants, and consulting companies selling positioning, including me) has worked very hard to turn positioning into a thing. A noun. A deliverable.

The positioning industry sells two things, and neither one is decisions

“Decisions” is hard to sell. Workshops and copy sprints aren’t.

So if you hire someone to do positioning, you’re going to get a workshop, a copywriting exercise, or both. Lord knows I’ve done plenty, still do.

But in the bald light of day, both approaches have serious problems.

Workshops turn into alignment theatre. Performances dominated by loud voices, power dynamics, and groupthink. Copy-based positioning degenerates into wordsmithing posing as strategy. You might get incrementally better words, but they rarely come with the buy-in that makes them stick.

And with both processes, the thing that truly moves the needle—the moments where leaders make decisions and commit to their ideas—are just exhaust. Comments. Slack messages. Things we throw away.

Positioning lives in your CEO’s heart, not a consultant’s brain

I confess.

I have run countless workshops and copywriting exercises. I cared about each of them immensely. Every time, I wanted to be the perfect facilitator, the copy ace who nailed the headline.

But when I stopped to examine what was really working and what wasn’t, I had a tough moment with myself. My need to perform, to be the star, was getting in the way. I was a salesman selling ideas, not a true critical thinking partner.

The thing that made strong positioning happen wasn’t my performance or word magic. It was conviction. My clients’ ability to fully own their decisions and commit.

So I started making some changes. I took a hard look at my positioning process to identify all the critical decision points from beginning to end. I left no stone unturned.

I wanted to map a single, seamless chain of logic, with every link accounted for. I started using my map immediately, without telling anyone. I ran it in the background as a checklist and a constant reminder to keep me honest and on-task.

The difference was immediate. Conversations got richer and moved faster. The downstream work crafting messages and brands ran more smoothly. And most importantly, the results were better.

Bigger deals. Better launches. Stronger fundraising.

Decisiveness is powerful.

I put my entire approach into a single tool: The Positioning Decisions Audit

The centerpiece of my consulting work is no longer a workshop or a copy deck. It’s an audit of all the decisions involved in positioning, the inputs to the process, and the status and content of each decision.

It’s a beast. There are 31 decisions across eight topics.

I use it as an end-to-end guide for every positioning project I do. It’s a forcing function that keeps me from skipping a step and makes sure I run conversations that get to the heart of every important question.

Decision-based positioning isn’t a reinvention of positioning.

Positioning is still the act of teaching a market how to perceive a product, rooted in clear perspectives about category, market, buyers, and differentiation.

Decision-based positioning is a different way through it that forces active thinking and ownership of the process.

When you look at positioning this way, you can’t be a passenger. And that dramatically changes the results.

It’s not just a checklist. It’s a constitution.

As I piloted and tested the audit, I quickly realized it was much more than a background tool.

As it turns out, the context and record of decision-making are insanely powerful in combination with AI. It’s an amazing substrate for AI-assisted thinking, both for using AI as a thinking tool and for building thinking tools with AI.

AI is great at ingesting conversations and making sense of them. Not just summarizing, but finding gaps and surfacing tensions.

I’ve found that in combination with the Audit, AI went from a pretty good positioning thought partner to an incredible one.

After every session, AI helps sharpen the next one. The breadcrumb trail makes the thinking compound.

Once the work is done, the audit (along with the transcripts and data inputs that shaped it) fully captures not just what was decided, but when, why, by whom, based on what, and how it evolved.

All of that information can go into a repo, with the decisions and the reasoning behind them fully understandable and useful for AI.

And when you do THAT, you have something more powerful than any positioning deck ever written.

Positioning as software. An evergreen constitution that the whole organization (and its AI tools) can reference and work with daily. With smart, active stewardship and a dash of process, positioning can become a living thing that you use every day, monitor carefully, and optimize over time.

Not a deck in a drawer. Not a cool homepage you noodled with a freelancer. Not a semi-annual leadership offsite.

We are entering a world where we work with and through AI. If your positioning isn’t understandable by AI, then it’s not really positioning anymore.

This is a meaty topic. I have a lot more to say about it. I am building the content as I go, while also running a very busy solo consulting company. But keep your eyes open. In my next newsletter, I’m going to break down the positioning audit in its entirety. Then, I’ll get into how I’m using it to do things I never dreamed were possible.

Thanks for being with me.

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The great sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, “Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken.” I think you can say the same thing about positioning.

Positioning as an idea has been bouncing around business and marketing culture since the late 1960s. If you follow the literature (and the topic on LinkedIn), you’ll find a lot of people claiming to have changed positioning somehow.

I’m taking the opposite approach.

I humbly submit that while I’m here to add whatever I can to the discipline of positioning, I have zero interest in redefining what it is.

I’m also going to break a bit of news. All the positioning experts banging away on LinkedIn and vying to tell you that they have finally cracked the perfect positioning framework are full of shit. There is no single perfect framework.

‍The best positioning framework is the one you will actually use, that helps you think clearly, build consensus, and take deliberate action.

As long as it covers these five topics:‍

1. What you are

2. Who you’re for

3. Who you compete with

4. Why you’re different

5. Why you’re great

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If you want a nice, clean definition in a sentence, then I’ll give you mine.

‍Positioning is the act of teaching a market what a product is, who it’s for, what makes it different, and why it’s great. If you want to get clinical about it, you can look at it like this:

1. What you are (category)

2. Who you’re for (buyer)

3. Who you compete with (competing alternatives)

4. Why you’re different (competitive advantage)

5. Why you’re great (value)

‍

If you’re doing a good job with positioning, you have clear, honest, plain English answers to these questions.

You can easily describe the category where you compete, the buyer you win, the reasons your buyer chooses you (I prefer to frame these as advantages, not differentiators. More on that later.), and the unique value you offer.

Maybe you want to add to this list. Maybe you want to play with the order, or say something a different way. I say, do what works.

Trust me on this. You can push it, pull it, stretch it, tweak it, stomp on it, chop it up, and hit it with a baseball bat. But you can’t change the elements of positioning any more than you can change the molecular structure of water or air.

You should know where your ideas come from, though

The single best thing I did for my career was to stop and ask where “best practices” actually came from. It became an incurable habit.

‍I love learning about the provenance of ideas. And I think it’s incredibly powerful. Knowing the provenance of your ideas can keep you from getting stuck in an intellectual rut. It can help you see the precepts and assumptions surrounding your work for what they really are: mostly opinions.

Even about positioning.

‍Let’s go back to the source

The term “positioning,” as I’m using it here, comes from the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout, which was published in 1980. (You probably know that.)

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But Jack Trout first wrote about “occupying a unique position in the mind of the buyer” in 1969. So, the idea of positioning as we know it today is decades old. It’s also made up. There’s no research mentioned in that article or the book. (You probably know that, too.)

Does this mean positioning is bullshit? I don’t think so. Yes, I think the idea that human beings have tiny slots in their brains for the things they buy is probably an overstatement.‍

But teaching an entire market what a product is, who it’s for, what makes it different, and why it’s great is an inarguable, fundamental act of marketing. I don’t need to run a 20-year longitudinal study to know that people are much less likely to buy products they don’t understand, think are for other people, or can’t tell apart.

‍

Teaching an entire market what a product is, who it's for, what makes it different, and why it's great is an inarguable, fundamental act of marketing.

Positioning statements don’t suck

‍

I’m going to jump ahead to what I think is actually the book that gave us positioning as we know it in the B2B tech universe, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore. In the book, this is the exact way Moore breaks down this positioning statement formula.

• For (target customers—beachhead segment only)

• Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative)

• Our product is a (product category)

• That provides (compelling reason to buy).

• Unlike (the product alternative),

• We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application)

‍

If I bring back up my five unassailable elements of positioning, they’re all covered.

• For (target customers—beachhead segment only) → BUYER

• Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative) → COMPETITION

• Our product is a (product category) → CATEGORY

• That provides (compelling reason to buy). → VALUE

• Unlike (the product alternative),

• We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application) → ADVANTAGES

I’ve read Crossing the Chasm many times. I still think it’s great. I think Geoffrey Moore’s positioning statement formula is sound. But here’s the funny thing about the provenance of ideas. I’m not so sure the positioning statement originated with Geoffrey Moore.

In the 1970s and 80s, Moore worked for a consulting firm named Regis McKenna, which was a sort of mini-McKinsey for the technology industry. You can dig into it yourself, and you’ll see that many of the ideas in Crossing the Chasm came from Geoffrey Moore’s time at Regis McKenna.

Maybe he came up with the approach all by himself while at Regis McKenna (and in fairness, Moore mentions the firm in the acknowledgements at the end of his book)...but that’s not really how things go.

I’m willing to bet the positioning statement formula was bouncing around Regis McKenna for a good while before Moore published it. I’m sure he shared it because he knew it worked.

Call me old-fashioned. I think it still does. (Even though I don’t use the run-on sentence format, which I find clunky.)

‍

‍

April Dunford didn’t reinvent positioning, either

‍

Let’s jump ahead to the other major book about B2B positioning, April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome. I think it’s a great book, and it’s a huge inspiration for In The Kitchen. I could write a long piece about what I appreciate about that book, and April is one of the giants upon whose shoulders I stand.

But I don’t think April Dunford changed Geoffrey Moore’s elements of positioning, which he probably picked up from his colleagues at Regis McKenna, who were probably influenced by Jack Trout.

Here’s a list of what April Dunford calls the “Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning”. (I’m skipping the “plus one,” “relevant trends”....I don’t think it really holds up, and she calls it optional.)

‍

1. Competitive alternatives

2. Unique attributes

3. Value (and proof)

4. Target market characteristics

5. Market category

‍

….if I bring back up the Moore framework…. April Dunford’s are all accounted for.

‍

• For (target customers—beachhead segment only) → TARGET MARKET CHARACTERISTICS

• Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative) → COMPETITIVE ALTERNATIVES

• Our product is a (product category) → MARKET CATEGORY

• That provides (compelling reason to buy). → VALUE AND PROOF

• Unlike (the product alternative),

• We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application) → UNIQUE ATTRIBUTES

‍

Which is why my second-least favorite part of Obviously Awesome is the opening where April Dunford says positioning statements are dumb and tells people not to use them. (I’ll get to my least-favorite in an upcoming Deep Read.)

I think Dunford gave us a useful framework for working on positioning.‍

I don’t think she changed it, though.

‍

The moral of the story: It’s ok to leave good ideas alone

‍

The world we live in rewards the new. The new AI tool, the new marketing buzzword, the latest tactic. It’s an addiction. That’s a shame, because a lot of the best ideas are old. My feeling about positioning is that we should spend less time trying to redefine it and more time trying to be great at it.

If you decide you like what I’m writing here and want to hang out on this page, that’s what you’re going to get. Reflections on a craft. Not reinvention of the wheel.

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Thanks for being here.