I opened a positioning document this morning to prep for a client's midyear review. I wrote it in January. The last modified date still says January.
Six months in between. Two product launches, a packaging refresh, a new head of growth, several hundred pieces of social. The document that was supposed to govern all of it has not been touched since the meeting where every person in the room agreed with it.
Agreement is not adoption. I keep having to learn this.
A positioning statement that lives only in the file that created it is not a position, it is a receipt for work you paid for.
The gap is not laziness. It is that approving a positioning feels like finishing something, and it is actually the start of the boring part. The workshop is fun. The debate about the one adjective is fun. Then everyone goes back to their real jobs, and the position sits in a folder while the brand gets built by whoever is writing the product page on a Thursday afternoon.
So I have started running the same three tests before I call a positioning live, and I ran them on my own January file this morning. It failed two.
One, the hiring test. Can somebody who joined last month state the position without opening anything? If the new growth lead has never seen the document, the document does not exist. Positioning that only the people who commissioned it can recite is a private language.
Two, the no test. Has it killed anything yet? A position that has not caused you to decline a partnership, cut a feature from a launch, or reject a headline is not doing work. It is decoration. The Patagonia version of this is famous because they actually turned down the revenue. Liquid Death says no to sincerity constantly, which is why the tone holds. Boundaries are the evidence.
Three, the surface test. Where does it physically appear outside the deck? In the creative brief template. In the onboarding doc. In the first slide of every kickoff. On the wall, unironically. If the answer is nowhere, then the position is competing against a hundred small decisions with nothing behind it.
Half the year is gone. This is the week the calendar makes everyone look, before the long weekend and the H2 kickoffs land on top of each other.
Positioning that only the people who commissioned it can recite is a private language.
At karaoke last week the host, who calls everyone baby, told a nervous first timer to just commit, nobody can hear the plan in your head. I have thought about that roughly forty times since. The document is the plan in your head. Somebody still has to sing it, badly, in front of people, on a sticky floor, every week until it is true.