Summary

Alignment on positioning isn’t a new tagline and a launch. It falters when teams read the same words differently and leave choices undecided. What lasts is making hard choices and operationalising them. That turns brand intent into investment focus and into consistent execution that compounds credibility.

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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

Context Sets The Bar

As organisations scale, “alignment” moves from a tidy messaging exercise to a leadership discipline. Multiple offers, hybrid teams, and faster cycles create drift: teams interpret the same words differently, processes diverge, and customers hear mixed promises. The risk is not philosophical; it is commercial.

Project Management Institute, as summarised by LSA Global, estimates that misalignment drains roughly $109 million for every $1 billion of spend—a near 10 percent leakage that leadership can and should control. The lesson is simple: positioning only matters if it changes what you prioritise, how you execute, and what the market consistently hears.

Alignment As Choices

Positioning is not a slogan; it is a few hard choices that set boundaries. The discipline is to decide who you serve best, what problem you solve distinctively, and which opportunities you will not chase. Most organisations we work with discover that the clarity comes not from wordsmithing but from trade-offs they are willing to live with.

• Name your primary customer and the defining problem you solve better than anyone.
• Write three “not-for-now” pursuits to protect focus for 12 months.
• Set the standard of proof for claims—what evidence you require before you say it.

Operationalise The Stance

Clarity without operational follow-through collapses under scale. Functions will reinterpret intent unless you turn choices into rules, rituals, and tools. Forrester with Opal found that only 1 percent of teams describe content planning as seamless, while 77 percent say silos block alignment—evidence that intent rarely survives without shared systems.

The remedy is pragmatic, not grand. Put the positioning into the flow of work so people do not need to translate it each time.

• Codify messaging rules with do/don’t examples and make them easy to find.
• Maintain a single source of truth that product, sales, and marketing actually use.
• Run a monthly decision forum to test bets against the chosen stance.
• Retire claims the evidence no longer supports and publish fresh proof points.

Leadership Implications

Leaders set the edge of the playing field. When choices are explicit and operationalised, three benefits compound:

• Investment clarity: you fund fewer, stronger bets and say no with confidence.
• Execution quality: handovers speed up and reviews become pattern-based, not opinion-driven.
• Market credibility: customers hear one promise, reinforced by consistent proof.

The real prize is not a sharper story but a steadier organisation: one whose positioning acts as a decision system that adapts with growth, signals resolve to the market, and keeps momentum pointed in one direction.

Sources:

• Organizational Alignment Creates Growth - misalignment costs — Project Management Institute via LSA Global summarizing PMI
• Forrester Consulting survey on marketing organizational alignment — Forrester x Opal

Further Resources

1. Evolving Brand Positioning: Aligning Perception with Growth
2. Evolving Brand Positioning to Unlock Growth with Trust
3. Navigating Category Perceptions: Aligning Brand Strategy for Growth

Brand clarity often begins with the right questions — we’d be glad to explore them with your team. Start the conversation.

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