Marketing is positioning.
​Positioning is difference.

If you want to sell anything, from an idea to a company, you need to successfully position it. Positioning can, and will, make or break you.

And positioning happens, with or without you. As you read this, your company, product, service or idea is being positioned by others. If they’re allowed to drive this process, you are not going to like the outcome.

Positioning is built on difference. When it’s foggy, you need a really bright light to get noticed. When it’s cluttered, you need to be highly differentiated to stand out.

The importance of difference is one of the few demonstrably true and scientifically supported facts in the often vague, but usually well-articulated world of marketing. Difference is a leading indicator. Lift your difference and good things will happen – to market share, revenue, profitability, and shareholder value. Let your difference drop and the opposite is true.

Of course, it’s easy to be different. Your difference must be true to who you are. It must be compelling to your audience. Difference must be a path to competitive advantage. Difference is hard, but it’s the one thing that makes everything easier. Without difference, you can work your heart out, but the outcome is fated to be incremental and therefore mediocre. Middle of the road. Unnoticed.

Because most brands and businesses are built from the inside out, positioning strategies should first guide and inspire organizational behavior. In brand and business building, what you do will always be more important than what you say.

This is what we do. We help our clients create positioning strategies that are built around differentiated advantage. We, quite literally, help them find difference. Ideally, we find a source of differentiated advantage within the product or service, then build our strategy. Occasionally, true difference is nowhere to be found, and we create a compelling point-of-view that can serve to differentiate the brand to its advantage.