Your positioning lives in other people’s minds
Most businesses think positioning is about crafting a definition of who they are and where they sit in the market.
While there is certainly an element of truth in that, customers themselves are often evaluating something much simpler beneath the surface.
“Do these people actually understand what matters to me?”
That nuance matters more than organisations realise. Positioning does not live in strategy documents, messaging frameworks, or brand workshops. It lives in the minds of other people.
Your customers.
In the impressions they form, the assumptions they make, and the feelings that they are left with after every interaction they have with your business.
Many businesses position themselves from the inside out. Describing their capabilities, their expertise, their ambitions, or their technology. Investing an enormous amount of energy deciding what it is that they want to say about themselves. Far fewer spend time understanding what people actually take away from that.
Customers, however, are usually interpreting what is said through a more personal lens.
Will this work for me?
Does this fit how I work and operate?
Do these people understand the pressures I am under?
In practice, the businesses that stay relevant are the ones that position themselves closest to the customer’s reality. Not the ones that make the most impressive or snazziest claims.
Relevance is more powerful than description
I have seen and worked with businesses that genuinely believe they have better products, stronger expertise, or more advanced technology than the competition around them. Convincing themselves that this should naturally lead to increased customer engagement.
Yet customers still continue to choose the alternative.
A question I am often asked to uncover is: why?
The pattern I see most regularly is that it is not always because the competitor has the better solution, but because they have positioned themselves more closely to the customer’s world. Their language reflects how customers think. Their offering fits more naturally into existing workflows and decision-making processes. The relevance, therefore, feels easier for the customer to recognise.
Easier to understand, easier to trust, and more aligned to the realities of their day-to-day work.
That is often the difference. Customers rarely experience a business from the inside out.
They experience it through fragments. A website, a proposal, a conversation, a recommendation, a moment of frustration, or a problem they need solved quickly.
It is in those moments where relevance matters enormously.
Customers are not looking to decode your business. They frankly have neither the time nor the interest. They are looking for the signs that you understand them.
That is why positioning is rarely just a messaging exercise. It is an exercise in creating alignment with the customer. Not persuasion as a tactic for the sake of it, but in helping customers feel a sense of recognition.
People want to feel understood
Particularly now, when people are increasingly sceptical about what is real, exaggerated, fake, or interchangeable, positioning has got to extend beyond language alone.
Of course communication matters, I am not suggesting it doesn’t. However, customers are not sitting there simply evaluating the words you share in a brochure or on a website. They are evaluating whether what you are offering is aligned with what they need, value and experience.
People inherently want to feel seen. Heard. Understood.
They do not want to be lectured to, nor talked at. They want to recognise themselves between the lines of what you say. Within the pages of the brochure or website.
I was reminded of this recently while trying to resolve something surprisingly simple: paying a bill. What should have been straightforward became a cycle of departments, handovers, and repeated explanations. My frustration was not the bureaucracy itself. Rather, it was the feeling that the system had not been designed around how people actually experience the problem.
This is where businesses unintentionally create distance. They focus too heavily on who they are trying to become, how they wish to be perceived, or how they compare against competitors, that they forget to spend time understanding how customers experience the challenges in front of them.
Positioning then becomes this abstract thing. This vague branding exercise that is discussed internally but detached from the customer’s reality. Customers are searching for confidence that what you offer will fit naturally into their world with as little friction as possible.
It all begins with recognition
We often treat positioning as something a business creates internally. A statement to refine. A message to control. A place to occupy in the market.
Positioning is not, then, what a business says about itself. Nor is it to one-upping the competitors by refining or mimicking their wording. It is ultimately about what customers come to believe.
Customers are not looking to admire your positioning. They are trying to recognise themselves within it. They are not looking to connect because the wording sounds intelligent or impressive.
They are looking to feel understood. To feel relevance to their pressures and what matters to them.
Many businesses want to position themselves as different.
I would argue that customers don’t care.
Most simply want to feel that someone finally understands their reality.
When marketing in your organisation feels busy but not effective, you are not alone. There is usually a deeper challenge in how marketing is being understood.
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