Positioning is harder than the textbooks make it sound

Most of our conversations lately come back to positioning. The through-line is that it's harder than anyone thought to nail down.

It's partly because our inherited brand wisdom comes from selling products. There's a truism: you can only stand for one thing in the mind of the consumer.

But when you buy a Coke, is it because you want happiness, as they hope? Or nostalgia? Habit? Are you thinking of your greatness when you buy a pair of Nikes, or, like me, do you just need a new pair of running shoes?

Marketers have hoped to connect a brand to a concept in order to help products jump off shelves or into an e-commerce shopping cart. But that isn't how you get hired. And it isn’t an effective way to define your positioning. 

We have a client who installs and maintains doors for multi-location retailers. They can't stand for safety. It's too broad, too crowded. But they can be the people committed to keeping your customers and employees safe with better doors and hardware.

Also, we have a financial planning client who wanted to stand for honesty. It's true of their firm. But it's on every competitor's website. What could they own instead? Solving a specific problem for a specific customer demographic.

The one-thing rule isn't wrong, but we often start at the wrong altitude. We reach for one lofty word and get lost in abstraction. The work is coming down to earth. And coming down to earth means starting somewhere more specific than a concept: it means starting with a customer.

We learned this ‌the hard way. For the first couple of years, we took every project that came our way. We were all over the place, but we were eager to learn and happy to see money coming in. Word of mouth and networking helped us grow from one project to the next. It was great until it wasn't: cash-flow problems, a revenue plateau, and a learning curve so steep on every new project that our expertise never got to compound.

It took us years of frustration to one afternoon end up at a whiteboard with three questions: who did we get the best results for, who did we enjoy working with most, who engaged with our content and closed the fastest. We saw the overlap we felt, but had been too scared to act on: professional and financial services firms, over and over. (We tell the full version of that story, whiteboard and all, here.)

That's the piece most positioning advice skips. It's not "pick one word." It's "pick one customer specific enough that the word finds itself."

But here's the part that took us longer to understand: positioning isn't a single decision you make and then defend forever. It's a position you keep refining with your writing. Writing is your strategy alive and breathing.

Marketing creates leads, which creates new business, which creates sharper case studies and insights, which sharpen the marketing again. Writing (strategy) gets sharper with each turn of the loop, like the old crank pencil sharpeners in elementary schools. And that sharpening is what keeps a position from sitting in a business plan or brand guidelines. (More on that loop, and what happens when it breaks, here.)

So the arc looks like this: stop reaching for one word. Find one customer instead. Then let your writing sharpen what "standing for something" actually means for that customer, month over month.

Have you figured out your one thing, or are you circling? Let us know — we'd love to hear either way.