Our Perspective
What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.
The New Job
Brand positioning is no longer the wrapper on your message; it’s the rulebook for how the organisation competes. In fast-moving markets, the benefit of positioning is less about attention and more about coherence: it should narrow options, accelerate decisions, and make trade-offs explicit. When it does, you experience compounding effects across product, sales, and service, as the same logic guides every move.
The alignment dividend is absolute. Agility PR Solutions reports that 86% of companies with tight sales and marketing alignment expect substantial revenue gains, versus just 33% where alignment is weak. Positioning that clarifies where you play and how you win gives those teams a shared basis for choices, not just common language.
Positioning As Governance
Treat positioning as governance: a small set of choices that concentrate effort and close doors. By deciding what you will not be, you free resources to deliver what only you can. That’s how positioning stops being decorative and starts driving performance.
Where it should bite:
- Markets and moments you’ll prioritise—and the ones you’ll exit
- The price bands you’ll serve and the channels you’ll back
- Features you’ll drop to reinforce the core experience
- Partners you’ll empower because they extend your advantage
Signals Of Drift
If positioning lives only in words, the organisation improvises. Sales writes its own story, the product chases edge cases, and operations carries the cost of inconsistency. The tell is not loud; it’s the quiet spread of exceptions that turn strategy into suggestion.
We often see the drift show up as:
- Discounting to compete on price alone
- Roadmaps swelling to mirror competitors, not customers
- Value propositions that morph by segment, region, or quarter
- Service levels promised don't match the customer experience
Proof, Not Posture
Claims invite scrutiny; proof earns trust. The evolved role of positioning is to set the standard of evidence your market can test. That means putting the receipts on the table and making your trade-offs visible. Done well, your story becomes observable in the way you price, deliver, and respond.
Applicable proof to publish:
- Side-by-side comparisons that show where you outperform
- Service guarantees tied to the few outcomes you stand behind
- Win–loss reasons shared internally and echoed in messaging
- Purposeful product omissions that signal what you won’t pursue
The organisations that treat positioning as a chosen sacrifice, defended in public by proof, turn brand from a surface asset into an operating advantage that compounds into resilience.
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