Stop calling everything premium.

Sit through enough brand workshops and you learn the word is coming before anyone says it. The competitive set goes up on the wall, someone squints at it, and then: "We see ourselves as the premium option." Fitness apps. Dog food. Payroll software. Everyone is premium now, which mathematically means no one is.

I did the tally once, on a competitive audit for an outdoor brand: of eleven direct competitors, nine used "premium" in their own materials. The two that didn't were the actual top and the actual bottom of the market. The cheapest brand knew better. The most expensive one didn't need the word.

Premium is a claim about your customer, not your product

Here's what teams miss: "premium" isn't a description of build quality. It's a promise that your customer can use the brand to say something about themselves. That's why premium can't be asserted. It has to be conferred. The market grants it when the brand behaves, over time, like something scarce and considered. And the market revokes it the moment the behavior slips.

I spent two years doing visual merchandising at Tiffany & Co. before I ever wrote a brand strategy, and it rewired how I think about this. Nobody at Tiffany said "premium" in a meeting, ever. Instead there were rules: about spacing, about light, about how few things a display case could hold, about what the store would never do during a sale, because there was never a sale. Premium wasn't the message. It was the operating constraint everything else obeyed.

The bill comes due in what you give up

That's the honest test of a premium positioning: not what you claim, but what you're willing to lose to keep it. Premium means walking away from the discount channel that would make this quarter. It means a product team allowed to ship late instead of shipping rough. It means saying no to the licensing deal, the flash sale, the co-brand with reach but no fit. Every one of those refusals has a dollar figure attached, and most brands claiming premium have never paid any of them.

The tell is the promotion calendar. If your brand is "premium" in the deck and 30% off in the inbox eleven times a year, your customers have done the math even if you haven't. Price integrity isn't a pricing tactic. It's the single most legible signal of whether the brand believes its own story.

Most brands should aim somewhere better

The good news: premium is not the only high ground, and for most brands it's the wrong hill. "Most trusted by people who do this every day" is a stronger position than "premium" for a tool brand. "The one that actually fits" beats "premium" for apparel. When I've done positioning work for brands like Eddie Bauer or MasterCraft, the winning territory was almost never up. It was specific. Specificity does what "premium" pretends to do: it gives the customer a reason to pay more that they can repeat to someone else.

That's the standard, by the way. A position is working when your customer can explain the price to a skeptical friend without using your ad copy. "It's premium" convinces no one. "It's the one the ski patrol guys buy" ends the argument.

The workshop fix

Next time the word comes up, ban it for the afternoon and ask the question it's hiding from: what do we do that our customer would defend at a dinner table? If the room has an answer, you have a position, and it will be better than premium. If the room goes quiet, you've found the actual work, and no amount of saying "premium" was going to do it for you.