Essay 03
Why positioning fails.
Positioning fails for a boring reason: most companies write it once, in a workshop, and never test it against how buyers actually describe their problem.
Good positioning isn’t a clever sentence. It’s a hypothesis about how a specific buyer thinks about a specific problem, tested against real conversations, real objections, and real competitive alternatives — then rewritten until the market’s language and the company’s language converge. When that convergence doesn’t happen, every downstream asset sounds accurate to the team and confusing to the buyer.
The fix isn’t a better tagline. It’s treating positioning as a living hypothesis, revisited every time the market, product, or competitive set shifts.