Your brand is already there. It just isn’t being read clearly

The problem with how we talk about positioning

In my work as a fractional marketing lead for owner-managed businesses, I see the same thing constantly: a company with a logo, a website, and some social media — and no position. The word gets thrown around in strategy meetings — “we need better positioning” — but it’s rarely understood as the commercial mechanism it actually is.

So let me be clear about what it is. Positioning isn’t a marketing term — it’s a business strategy decision, and the foundation of any real brand strategy. It decides who you’re for, what makes you different, and why anyone should believe you. And by extension it sets your pricing power, your conversion rate, and whether you build a brand that compounds over time or one that competes on price forever.

That line comes from Al Ries and Jack Trout, who introduced positioning as a formal concept in 1969. Over fifty years later, the principle hasn’t changed — because the human mind hasn’t. We are still filtering noise by assigning meaning to brands. The brands that win are the ones that decide that meaning deliberately, rather than leaving it to chance.

Their insight was simple: the market is over-communicated. Your customers don’t have the bandwidth to weigh up every option, so they build shortcuts — categories, rankings, associations. Positioning is how you engineer where your brand sits in that hierarchy, before the customer even consciously chooses.

Core positioning vs segment positioning

Here’s where most positioning advice falls short: it treats positioning as a single statement — one audience, one message — as if every business sold one thing to one person. Very few do.

In reality, a business has one core positioning: the space the brand occupies in the market as a whole. That’s the anchor, and it barely moves. Underneath it sit segments — different products, services and audiences, each with its own ideal customer profile (ICP). And the targeting and messaging can, and should, shift for each one.

The mistake is treating those as separate positioning exercises. They’re not. Segment-level messaging is an expression of the core position, tuned for a specific buyer — never a contradiction of it. The core decides where the brand stands; each segment decides how that stance is spoken to a particular audience.

So the discipline is two-layered. The core positioning is fixed — where the brand sits, what it stands for, why it’s different at the level of the whole business. Segment positioning flexes within that core: for each product, service and ICP, you re-tune the frame of reference, the point of difference you lead with, and the language — while everything still ladders up to the same core.

You can get this wrong in two directions. Flex the core itself for every segment and the brand fractures — it means something different to everyone, which is the same as meaning nothing. Refuse to flex the message at all and you speak to every segment in the same generic voice — the “too broad” failure from earlier, just moved down to the messaging layer. The skill is holding the core still while letting the message move.

The claim test

Here’s a test I run on almost every business that comes to me. Pull up your homepage or your LinkedIn bio and ask one question:

This is the single most common failure I see in small business marketing. Not bad creative. Not poor channel choice. Positioning so broad it’s invisible. In practice, very few businesses have consistent, differentiated messaging — which is exactly why the opportunity is so large for the ones who do the work.

Why most positioning fails

The mistakes aren’t complicated — they’re just consistent. Once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them in your own marketing, or your competitors’. These are the four I run into most.

How to define your brand positioning — 5 steps

Positioning isn’t discovered in a boardroom. I find it at the intersection of three things: what your customers need most, what your competitors can’t credibly claim, and what you can genuinely deliver. Here’s the process I use.

The output isn’t a document that sits in a folder — it’s a filter, and the layer your whole marketing strategy sits on top of. I test every piece of content, every campaign, every product decision against the statement: does this reinforce who we are? Does it speak to the person we’re for? If not, it doesn’t belong.