Part One

What positioning actually is

Positioning is you defining and defending a claim to a specific market. Who you serve. The problem you own. Why you are the obvious choice for that particular buyer.

Notice what's missing from that...any mention of a competitor.

That's where most agencies go wrong. They confuse positioning with differentiation. Differentiation asks how you stack up against the agency pitching against you. Positioning asks whether your claim to a market is one you can actually hold, whether or not anybody else exists.

"Direct competitive positioning is something like saying, 'I'm a jackal, but my teeth don't hurt as much.' Positioning is not about defending yourself against another agency in as much as it is about creating the beacon that signals safe harbor."

Issue #156

A real position sits at the intersection of four things, and all four have to be true at the same time:

• What your target market actually needs
• What you are genuinely capable of
• Where you think their world is heading
• What you believe about it

"Positioning is where you find yourself on the map of the market. It's the intersection of target market need, your capabilities, your future vision, and your point of view."

Issue #164

Take away any one of the four and you don't have a weaker position, you have a claim. Market need without capability is a promise you can't keep. Capability without market need is a hobby. Both of those without a point of view is a commodity. And all three without a vision of where their world is heading gives a buyer zero reason to pick you over the agency that already knows their category.

Part Two

Why most agency positioning fails

You built it inside-out

Most agencies start from what's defensibly true about themselves. Everything you grab that way is true. It's also true of everybody else, which is the whole problem.

"The agency thinks of itself as an island. So they grab simple and obvious things that are defensively true about them. This is positioning from the inside out."

Issue #156

The sea of sameness

Agencies all converge on the same tiny vocabulary: data-driven, extension of your team, customer-centric, results-focused, full-funnel. Every one of those was descriptive once. Now they are background noise.

"The common vernacular makes every agency look the same, it's as if every agency is called Bob, and you never know which one someone is referring to because they are all called Bob."

Issue #156

"Better" is doing no work for you

The reflexive fallback is to claim you are better. Better results, better process, better people. It carries no decision weight, because every agency in the running is saying the identical thing and the buyer has no way to check it before signing.

"Buyers don't really buy better. Better is so squishy, subjective, kind of fluffy and soft."

Issue #158

There's a second problem with better. Your prospect already knows their situation is bad...that's why they started looking. Marginal improvement almost never justifies the risk of switching vendors. Better asks somebody to take on real internal risk for a gain they can't verify.

Your claim is too flabby to mean anything

Most agencies can't say what they do in one sentence without hemming and hawing.

"Take this X for Y: We do paid social for ecommerce. 'Paid social' means about nine different things. 'Ecommerce' covers Amazon, DTC brands, B2B ecom players... and the dropshipping bro hanging out in Bali."

Issue #172

Or, to put it the way I did in the Clue issue: you have just announced that the murder happened in a house as a solution.

Part Three

The four questions that produce a position

Before you write a single line of positioning copy, answer four questions. I stole them from brand strategist David Placek. Most agency owners skip straight to the messaging, which is exactly why the messaging never holds up.

"If you can answer those four questions with specificity and honesty, you have a positioning strategy. You have the core of your pitch. You have the bones of your VVV."

Issue #137

Those four map onto four layers of understanding. Yourself, your capability, your market, your client. That isn't an accident. Positioning is downstream of understanding, which is why agencies that shortcut straight to a tagline end up with a tagline and nothing underneath it.

Part Four

Build a beacon, not a comparison

The image I keep coming back to is a beacon. Not a billboard shouting at everybody, and not a shield you hold up against competitors. A signal that reads, unmistakably, as safe harbor to one specific kind of buyer.

"Positioning isn't the things you say about yourself, but rather how you say the things that the market will hear."

Issue #156

The extended version involves meerkats. Agencies are jackals. Buyers are meerkats. From where the meerkat is standing, every jackal looks identical, and all the stuff you are proud of is invisible: "Meerkats don't differentiate between jackals. They only see the teeth." Your ability to show that you understand what this particular family of meerkats needs and fears is what turns moonlight on your teeth into a beacon that signals safety.

Mirror their language, not yours

The mechanism here is language. Dig out the actual vocabulary, fears and aspirations of one narrow segment, then build the claim from those words.

Issue #156 works a case study in the education sector. A generically true value, caring about long-term client outcomes, translated into the words that segment actually uses: mission, legacy, community, foundation. Same value. Completely different reception.

Same logic applies to your case studies. A result can be framed more than one way, and the framing follows the buyer.

"...adjust your case studies from 'we drove an 11,742% increase in return on ad spend' to 'we managed a consistent cost per acquisition throughout a stage of sustainable growth', even if it is drawing a different conclusion from the same set of circumstances and facts."

Issue #164

Three competitors you're forgetting

If your positioning only separates you from other agencies, you have left your three most common losses unaddressed. You are usually not losing to a rival shop:

• Inertia and the status quo. The most common outcome of any agency search is that nothing happens at all.
• Hiring in-house. A head of growth feels like control and looks cheaper on a spreadsheet.
• AI tools. Increasingly the first thing a prospect tries before calling anybody.

A defensible position answers all three without naming them, by showing expertise that can't be replicated by waiting, hiring, or prompting.

Part Five

Tightening it: X for Y (without Z)

This is the practical core of the whole guide. The sentence you are aiming for is the one a prospect says about you, without being prompted:

"I found you because you do X for Y."

Issue #172

Most agencies can't say that out loud without hedging. The fix is to tighten the WHO first, because once the WHO gets specific, everything else stops being a decision.

Every rung down, the population shrinks and the clarity goes up. At the bottom rung you can picture their meeting agenda, name their quarterly problem, and guess what's keeping them up in Q3. That's the whole point.

"Once you know WHO, X and Y are OBVIOUS."

Issue #172

Run the tight WHO back through the sentence and you get something a stranger could repeat accurately:

That "without Z" clause is the part most agencies never get to. It signals that you know the shape of the problem well enough to know what solving it usually costs, which is a much harder thing to fake than a list of services.

Part Six

The defensibility test

A position is only worth as much as the evidence behind it. This is the test that kills most nice-sounding positioning statements.

"If your capabilities don't match up with the target market need, that's a position you can't defend."

Issue #164

An agency claiming to serve brands spending six figures a month on Meta, having never managed more than five grand a month, doesn't have a position. It has marketing copy. That claim survives right up until the first real conversation with a qualified buyer, and then it costs you more than it ever earned.

Run every candidate position through three questions:

• Can I prove it? Named clients, results, a track record a skeptical buyer would accept.
• Can I hold it under pressure? When the pipeline gets thin in August, will this still be what I say?
• Would a competitor find it awkward to copy? If any agency could paste it onto their homepage tomorrow, it isn't a position yet.

Part Seven

The slippery slope that kills your position

This is where positioning actually dies. Not in the strategy session. In the moment an off-target prospect with a real budget sends an email.

Be honest about this one: taking a single off-target client probably won't kill you. It's a slippery slope, though, and the slope is a lot steeper than it looks from the top.

"It is nearly impossible to sell the same thing to turtles and Labrador retrievers and hedgehogs and girls and boys."

Issue #164

Take a few because the money is real, and six weeks later your yard is a motley congregation of boys, girls, turtles, dogs, hedgehogs and probably a couple of toads. Now you can't attract the buyers you actually wanted, because nothing you say is aimed at them anymore. Your client base becomes your positioning whether you meant it to or not.

The upside is the part nobody expects. Narrowing speeds you up:

• You get expert in fewer verticals, so your execution gets sharper and more efficient
• Your insights get deeper, because you keep seeing the same problems from different angles
• Referrals get easier, because people can finally describe you in one sentence

The wide-net instinct is borrowed from businesses that need thousands of customers. You need dozens.

Part Eight

Saying it so people understand

A position your market can't decode isn't a position. Two failure modes do most of the damage.

Jargon, and the loss aversion underneath it

Agencies describe themselves through the techniques they personally find interesting instead of the benefit the buyer gets. And they keep the language broad, because narrowing feels like closing doors.

Borrowing Brené Brown's line, clear is kind, unclear is unkind. Being unclear with somebody who has a real problem isn't neutral, it's a small unkindness. The only question your prospect is asking is can you help me, yes or no, and most agency copy never gets around to answering it. Issue #169

Leading with HOW

Every pitch contains three things, and they are not equally important:

• HOW. Your craft. Methods, tools, deliverables, process.
• WHAT. The outcome your prospect is trying to accomplish.
• WHO. The specific person in the room, which sets the language.

Nearly every agency leads with HOW, because HOW is what you know best and find most interesting. But HOW is the vehicle, not the destination, and a buyer without your expertise can't evaluate it anyway. Being the smartest person in the room doesn't help if the room can't follow you. Issue #171

Neat on the shelf, messy in the room

The answer to "but we do way more than that" is a sequencing rule.

Present neat. One problem, one kind of client, one method, so the market can file you in the right cubbyhole and pull you off the shelf when the need shows up. Then be messy once you are in conversation, showing the real depth and flexibility of what you do, which is what makes you hard to replace. Legibility gets you considered. Depth gets you kept. Issue #168

Part Nine

Putting it on your website

Your homepage is where positioning either lands or evaporates. Seven steps, in order:

One technique worth calling out separately: Accuse & Rescue. Open by naming an uncomfortable, specific truth about your reader's situation, then immediately offer the way out. The accusation earns attention because it's specific and true rather than a generic industry gripe. The rescue stops it landing as an insult. Accusation with no rescue is just an insult with better typography.

Part Ten

Positioning and lead gen are the same thought

Agencies treat positioning and lead generation as two separate projects, usually owned by two different people. They are the same thought in different containers.

"All of the tactics that you might associate with lead gen are just containers for the messaging that you've developed in your positioning."

Issue #172

Which explains a common and expensive pattern. An agency fixes its positioning, changes nothing about distribution, sees no new pipeline, and decides positioning doesn't work.

A position that never reaches buyers where they actually form opinions has no commercial value. Most sophisticated buyers have decided how they feel about you long before they visit your site, so the work has to live in the channels they already occupy. Issue #141

Relevance beats offer

Here's the counter-position to the offer-first school, with the disagreement left in:

"With all due respect to Alex Hormozi and his $100M Offers book, I don't think that it's your offer that wins... What does win attention is understanding what's relevant, needed, and urgent inside of your prospect's world."

Issue #172

I'm not saying offers don't matter. I'm saying that for the clients you actually want, guarantees and risk-reversal read as noise, while obvious understanding of their specific situation reads as a reason to take the meeting.

And relevance has a durability that offers don't. A competitor can copy your guarantee by lunchtime. They can't copy knowing your buyer's world.