Why anybody that matters won’t read your positioning statement.

Positioning was never supposed to be something you do in a workshop.

That probably sounds strange, given that most firms experience it as exactly that: a two-day offsite, a stack of Post-it notes, a facilitator with good questions and a slightly messy slide deck, and somewhere at the end of it all, a statement. A crisp, agreed formulation of who you are, who you serve, and why you win. Something to put on the website. Something to brief the sales team on. Something to tick off the list and, crucially, stop thinking about.

The workshop wasn’t always how this went. Worth tracing it back. Not because history is inherently instructive – often it’s just history – but because knowing where something came from explains a great deal about why it keeps failing in the same specific ways.

It Started as an Advertising Problem. Your Firm Is Not an Advertisement.

Positioning as a formal concept entered the business vocabulary in 1981, through a book by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Their argument was specific: in a market crowded with messages, the real competition wasn’t between products or services, it was between perceptions. What you sold mattered less than where you sat in the mind of the buyer. The goal was to occupy a distinct position in that mental landscape and defend it.

Their examples were mostly consumer brands. Avis. 7-Up. Volkswagen. The logic was advertising logic: clarity of message, consistency of signal, repetition over time. One message, many passive buyers, broadcast media doing the work.

It was a good idea for its context.

Services firms, watching this work for Hertz and Avis, reasonably concluded that the same principle applied to them. And in some ways it did. Clarity matters. Specificity matters. Buyers do form impressions. So far, so sensible.

What got lost in the translation was almost everything else.

The consumer goods model rests on a particular assumption: buyers receive messages, form impressions gradually, and the job of the brand is to shape those impressions through consistent, repeated signals. The market is relatively stable. The buyer is relatively passive. The message is the thing that moves.

Services buying works differently. The buyer is not passive. They are, increasingly, most of the way through a decision before they make contact with a seller at all. Research tracking thousands of B2B buying journeys found that in 95% of cases, the winning vendor was already on the buyer’s Day One shortlist – before the first call, before the proposal, before the relationship formally began. The race most firms think they’re running in the sales conversation was largely settled before it started.

What determined the shortlist wasn’t the best pitch. It was accumulated perception, built over time, from every interaction, piece of content, referral, and observed behaviour that preceded the formal process.

This is not, to be clear, a messaging problem. It’s a positioning problem. But it’s a positioning problem of a fundamentally different kind to the one Ries and Trout were solving in 1981 for a car rental company.

Three Ways Firms Get Positioning Wrong (Or: A Brief Taxonomy of Expensive Confusion)

The first misreading: positioning is a marketing problem.

This is perhaps the most damaging of the three, because it determines who gets put in the room and who gets left out of it. If positioning is a marketing problem, it belongs to marketing. Marketing will handle it. Marketing will brief the agency, agree the messaging, update the website, and report back when it’s done. The partners can get on with doing the actual work.

The problem is that positioning isn’t produced by marketing. It’s owned much further upstream – by the founders, by the partners, by the people actually in the room with clients. It lives in the choices they make about which problems to take on, which conversations to lean into, which thinking to develop and publish and stand behind. Marketing can express a position that already exists. It cannot manufacture one that doesn’t, and it cannot sustain one that the firm’s behaviour keeps quietly contradicting.

The tell is when a firm describes its positioning as something the marketing team owns. What they usually mean is that marketing owns the document. The founders own the reality. The people in client rooms are updating it in real time, whether or not anyone has noticed. The market, meanwhile, is forming its view based on all of that – and very little of it involves the website.

The second misreading: positioning is a statement.

The statement is an output. It summarises, usefully, where the firm believes it sits. But the positioning isn’t in the statement. The positioning is in everything that makes the statement either credible or hollow when a buyer encounters it.

A firm that has genuinely earned a position of recognised expertise in a specific domain has positioning. A firm that has written “recognised experts in specific domain outcomes” on its homepage has a statement. The confusion between the two is how firms end up with positioning that sounds convincing in the conference room and does nothing in the market. (The conference room, it should be noted, is the worst possible place to test whether something is working. The conference room will agree with almost anything delivered with sufficient confidence.)

The third misreading – and the one with the longest tail: positioning is something you arrive at.

This is the most seductive misreading because it’s the most human. We like projects with ends. We like the moment of completion. We like knowing that the positioning work is done and we can focus on the actual work. It maps neatly onto the way services firms are structured: there’s billable work, and then there’s overhead, and positioning lives in the overhead column, so the incentive is to complete it efficiently and return to billing.

The positioning workshop exists, in part, because firms need positioning to feel like something you finish.

The market, having not been consulted on this preference, does not cooperate.

What Positioning Actually Is (Once You Stop Trying to Put It in a Drawer)

Here is positioning without the workshop framing.

Positioning is the accumulated answer to a single question: when the right buyer has a specific problem, are you the obvious choice?

Not: do they know about you. Not: do they like your website. Not: have they heard your pitch. The question is whether, at the moment their need crystallises, you are already present in their thinking as a credible, specific answer to that specific problem.

That presence isn’t created in the moment of need. It’s built over time, through everything the firm does, says, produces, and demonstrates. The proposal, the published thinking, the referral someone gave last year, the talk at the conference three years ago, the case study that landed on the right desk at the right moment. Positioning is the residue of all of it.

Which immediately reveals the problem with episodic positioning.

If positioning is accumulated presence, then neglecting it is cumulative decay. The half-life of clarity in a market that keeps moving is not infinite. Dentsu’s research across more than 3,500 B2B buyers found that the average decision-making process became 54 days longer between 2021 and 2024. Not faster. More complex. More stakeholders, more scrutiny, more prior research arriving at the table before the seller enters the room. In that environment, the firm whose positioning was calibrated to the market as it was three years ago is building accumulated presence in response to questions the market is no longer asking.

This is what eroding positioning looks like from the inside: not dramatic collapse, but gentle friction. Win rates that drift slightly. Pitches that feel like they almost land. Relationships that progress warmly and then stall at commitment. The firm hasn’t changed. The market has. The positioning hasn’t kept pace. And because the decay is gradual rather than sudden, it tends to get diagnosed as a sales problem, or possibly a pricing problem, or perhaps the team needs better conversion training.

“Sales” is not to blame.

The Workshop Was Never Going to Save You. Here Is What Might.

Continuous Positioning™ is not a new version of the workshop. It’s a different answer to the question of what positioning is for.

If the goal is accumulated presence with the right buyers at the moment of their need, then positioning isn’t a document you produce and deploy. It’s a practice you maintain. It’s the ongoing work of understanding what the market is asking, what the firm can genuinely answer, and where those two things meet most valuably. That understanding is never finished because the market is never finished.

What Continuous Positioning™asks of a firm is not that it constantly reinvent itself. (That would be exhausting and, frankly, suspicious. Buyers don’t trust firms that seem to be a different firm every time they look.) It asks that the firm keeps the conversation live. That what’s learned from client work, from market signals, from competitive observation, from the firm’s own evolving thinking, feeds back continuously into how the firm describes and positions itself. That the people doing the work are also, in a meaningful sense, the people calibrating the positioning – because they’re the ones with the most current read on what the market actually values.

This is harder than it sounds. Not technically. Hard in the way that changing a foundational assumption is always hard, which is: very, but in the kind of quiet way that doesn’t announce itself as difficulty until you’re well into it.

The assumption being replaced is that clarity is something you achieve and then have. The shift is to: clarity is something you practice, and the practice is the capability. Bain’s most recent survey of B2B commercial performance found that the top-performing firms delivered roughly twice the revenue growth of the average for their industries in 2024. The gap wasn’t primarily technology or talent or strategy. It was execution quality and the capacity to keep recalibrating. The data describes something that looks less like a distribution and more like a sorting mechanism. Two populations. The firms adapting as they go, and the firms waiting until the discomfort is legible enough in the numbers to feel urgent.

The uncomfortable thing about the second group is that they’re usually very good at what they do. They’re not failing. They’re just winning slightly less, slightly more slowly, at slightly higher cost, and attributing it to everything except the thing that’s actually causing it.

The Firms That Will Be Obvious in Five Years Are Already Doing Something Different Today

The firms that will be the obvious choice in five years are not necessarily the ones with the best positioning today. They’re the ones that have understood positioning as an organisational capability rather than an episodic project.

There’s a phrase that surfaces regularly in conversations with the people running services firms: “we know we need to do this better.” It’s not a statement of ignorance. These are smart, self-aware leaders. It’s a statement about the gap between knowing something and having built the architecture to act on it continuously. The strategy day produces the insight. The quarterly review surfaces the gap. The partner meeting agrees something needs to change. Then the billable work comes back in, and the insight sits in the notes from two months ago, quietly becoming less actionable by the week.

The kind of actionable momentum required to become obvious requires discipline that starts at a structural level – something that’s built into the rhythm of the firm, the same way financial discipline isn’t something that happens at the annual accounts review. It’s present in every decision, or it isn’t really there. That’s exactly what Continuous Positioning enables.

A Closing Thought, Followed by Two Uncomfortable Questions

The book from 1981 was right about one thing above all else: positioning lives in the mind of the buyer, in what moves them deeply (which is often times not rational) – not in the materials of the seller.The mistake was treating that as a static situation to manage rather than a dynamic one to participate in continuously.

The market is always asking questions. Some firms are always updating their answers. The rest are still working from the answers they wrote down the last time someone booked a facilitator and cleared the diary. (Which, if the diary-clearing is anything to go by, cost a significant amount of money and produced a document that currently lives in a shared folder nobody has opened since the offsite.)

If positioning is practice rather than project, and if the firms building it as capability are compounding an advantage that episodic repositioning cannot close, what exactly is the cost of treating it as something you do occasionally when things feel off?

And when, precisely, would things need to feel off enough to act?