It’s (wrongly) become somewhat of a buzzword in business circles. Yet it plays a crucial role in any organisation.

Get it right and you’ll have better internal alignment and attract more of the right type of customers. Get it wrong and well, you can guess what comes next.

But what is it?…

P-O-S-I-T-I-O-N-I-N-G.

Some (wrongly) believe that positioning is their branding or some type of marketing hack.

Others think it’s a killer one-liner on your website. A creatively crafted sentence on the cover of your brochure. A neat sentence in a deck. A tidy articulation of “what we do.”

All wrong.

Because positioning isn’t a slogan. It’s the lens through which your audience understands who you are and why you matter.

It makes clear which audience(s) you serve, which problem(s) you’re committed to solving and what makes you different to your peers.

Positioning helps you stand out. Helps you sell more. And helps you create consistency across teams who would otherwise be improvising their own version of the story.

When you haven’t quite nailed your positioning, you unintentionally sabotage your growth opportunities and ambitions.

Here are some of the tell-tale signs to look out for:

1. Listing Capabilities Instead of Outcomes

This is number one on our list as it’s the most common. Rather than talking about the impact created through the products and services delivered, many companies reel off a list of line items.

When your audience reads “we do this” and “we do that,“ you sound identical to others in your category.

The brands that stand out and win are those that take the time to understand their ideal customers and build their positioning around the issues that matter most to them.

Meaningful positioning doesn’t showcase a menu of services; it clarifies the outcomes you create and why they matter. It’s classic Emotion vs Logic, where:

  • Emotion is what moves people. It’s the instinctive “yes,” the sense of trust, the feeling of being understood, the relief of a problem solved, and
  • Logic, which steps in after the emotional decision to make it defensible. It provides the rational scaffolding: the facts, features, comparisons, numbers, etc.

2. Allowing Competitors to Affect Your Thinking

Whether businesses like to admit it or not, most get distracted by competitor activity that feels like they’re copying your homework.

It might be a new product or service launch. Or perhaps a new feature or whitepaper.

Of course, you should absolutely know what your competitors are up to on a regular basis. That’s just sound business practice.

But it’s certainly not advisable to constantly worry about them, shall we politely say, “mirroring your thinking.” 

This is the nature of competition. We experience the same in our sector. Your competitors are constant and evolving. And some will always imitate or outright copy.

However, imitation rarely comes with depth. It’s surface‑level at best. A veneer without your thinking, vision, values or story behind it. Therefore, it’ll never be the same.

And staying true to your thinking, vision and values is the key. The brands that win are those that understand and channel their positioning, proposition and culture through those elements.

Competitors can copy your words and with advances in AI, your visuals. What they can’t copy is your depth of expertise, the lived experiences, cultural foundations and strategic intent that give those words and images meaning.

In trying to do so, eventually they’ll come unstuck. The smart buyers will see through it. And just like in The Wizard of Oz, the curtain will be pulled back to reveal the truth.

3. A Story Without Soul

Another common problem is positioning that lacks soul.

It may articulate the facts. Might even include some benefits or outcomes.

But it lacks emotion, substance or a point of view that gives it any real presence. Nothing that signals how or why your perspective matters.

And without that, it becomes interchangeable. Essentially something any competitor could lift, tweak and claim as their own.

Soul is what gives your positioning its edge. It’s the energy, conviction and perspective that only your brand can bring.

It signals who you are, how you think and why you operate the way you do. When that’s missing, the story feels hollow. When it’s present, the story narrative becomes unmistakably yours and impossible to imitate.

4. Positioning Isn’t ‘One and Done’

Positioning is rarely something you finish and set aside ad infinitum.

It should reflect the reality of your business today. And as your products/services, customers or category evolves, so does the story you tell.

This is unlikely to be an annual event. And it’s often a case of recalibrating or sharpening, rather than rewriting everything. But it certainly needs to adapt and evolve over time.

These shifts will largely be subtle, providing a more accurate articulation of your evolution. Others may be more structural, driven by your market or ambition.

But by revisiting your positioning periodically, it facilitates alignment. It forces you to think and in many respects, rethink, what you stand for, what you prioritise, and how you want to be known.

And that clarity compounds over time. It keeps the brand coherent as you grow and ensures the story you tell remains intentional, timely and anchored in who you are becoming.

In Summary…

Positioning isn’t surface level, a tagline or marketing dark art.

But it can determine whether your brand is easy to find, understand and choose over your competition.

In order to cut through, convert and compound over time, focus on the fundamentals:

  • Speak in outcomes, not line items
  • Hold your own narrative, regardless of competitors
  • Inject emotion, not just logic
  • Treat positioning as ongoing, not static