A client sent over a positioning statement last week that read, in full: the most innovative, customer-obsessed platform for modern teams of every size. I read it four times on a video call while eleven faces waited for me to say something kind about it.
I asked one question. Which of your competitors could not also say this sentence?
Nobody answered. A dog barked in somebody's Zoom square.
Positioning is not a description of your company, it is a decision about who you are willing to lose.
I have been doing this long enough to see the same three failures in almost every brief that crosses my desk, and they are not stupidity. They are all forms of flinching.
One, positioning against a competitor. The brief says we are like Slack but for X, or the Warby Parker of Y. It feels efficient because everyone in the room instantly understands it. It is also fatal, because you have made the competitor the category and yourself the footnote. Every sentence you write from that point forward runs through their brand first. Liquid Death did not position itself against Dasani. It positioned against the entire boring, wellness-coded aisle and made canned water look like something a bass player would order.
Two, positioning too broadly. Teams of every size means teams of no size. Broad positioning is what happens when sales is in the room and cannot bear to hear that a segment is not for us. So the statement gets sanded down until it offends nobody and moves nobody. Salt & Straw does not sell ice cream to people who want ice cream. It sells to people who will try pear and blue cheese on a Tuesday, and it lets everybody else go to the grocery store, happily.
You have made the competitor the category and yourself the footnote.
Three, positioning aspirationally. This is the subtle one. The statement describes the company you intend to be in three years, not the one shipping today. Premium, trusted, effortless. Then the customer meets the actual product, and the gap between what you claimed and what they got is exactly where trust dies. Oatly works because the voice on the carton and the strangeness of the product are the same strangeness. Nothing is promised that the oat milk cannot deliver.
The fix for all three is the same and it is uncomfortable. Write the sentence, then write down who it costs you. If the answer is nobody, you have not positioned anything. You have written a compliment about yourself and put it on slide three.
Barnaby holds exactly one position, which is the warmest square of floor in the apartment at any given hour. He has never once tried to also be the second warmest. There is a discipline in that I keep failing to teach anyone who pays me.