Last Thursday I ran a small experiment in a client's hallway. I stood near the kitchen and asked six people, one at a time, to tell me what the company does. One sentence. No preamble, no whiteboard.
I got six sentences. Two were about software. One was about workflow. One was a mission statement recited so smoothly I knew it had been laminated somewhere. The head of sales gave me the version he uses on calls, which was the only answer a stranger could have followed. The founder gave me the origin story instead, because founders always do.
Nothing matched. Not the verb, not the customer, not the category.
We closed positioning work for this company in October. There is a deck. It is, if I am honest, a good deck.
Positioning is not what the deck says. It is what your team says when nobody is holding the deck.
Here is the part that gets lost. Most positioning work is evaluated in the room where it is presented, by the eight people who watched it get built. Everyone nods. Someone says the word crisp. The file goes into a shared drive with a version number, and the actual test, whether a project manager can explain the company to her brother-in-law at a barbecue, never gets run.
So run it. It takes an afternoon and it costs nothing. Ask ten people across three departments. Write down exactly what they say, including the throat-clearing. You are not grading them. You are measuring how far your sentence traveled from the room it was born in.
Three things usually show up in the transcript. One, the verb drifts. Strategy said we help teams decide, and engineering heard we build dashboards, and both are technically true, which is the problem. Two, the customer inflates. The sentence that named a specific buyer in October now says businesses. Three, the differentiator vanishes first, because it is the hardest part to remember and the easiest part to skip.
The companies that hold a line hold it through repetition that borders on rude. Liquid Death has said the same eleven words about murdering your thirst since the day it launched. Oatly puts its own argument on the side of the carton and does not modernize it every quarter. That is not brand discipline as an aesthetic. That is a sentence being said out loud enough times that the staff can say it in their sleep.
You are not grading them. You are measuring how far your sentence traveled from the room it was born in.
I tried the exercise at home, for symmetry. Truffles was asleep on the router. Barnaby looked at me, then at the treat drawer, and gave a completely consistent answer. Both cats know exactly what I do. I feed them. Nobody in that house has ever needed a second version.