Positioning is not a tagline. It is the sentence a customer says about you when you are not in the room — and if you have not decided what that sentence is, they will improvise one, usually about price.
The work starts with what is already true. Every business has an asymmetry: something it does that competitors cannot copy quickly, or a proof it has that others do not. Often it is hiding in plain sight — a founder’s history, a client nobody expects, a process that survived a hard year. Our own name is an example: Boujdyate is a family name that translates from Moroccan Darija as goat, and GOAT is what the market already says about the work it respects. That was there before we noticed it.
Then we decide what to be against. Positioning that offends nobody moves nobody. The sharpest question in the workshop is usually not who are we for but who are we willing to lose.
From there it becomes a system: the messaging architecture that keeps every page and pitch saying the same thing, the vocabulary your team uses without being told to, the launch narrative, and the visual and verbal identity that carries it.
We have built this end to end. For Davidoff’s centenary, a jubilee mark, key visual and complete carrier system for one hundred years of a legendary brand — and separately, a mobile-first ecosystem where discovery, promotions and gameplay all fed one CRM. Heineken’s trade and off-trade programme turned a display brief into a full 3D family for the UEFA Champions League. NOW Media needed an identity that could hold fashion, food, film and society without falling apart.
The test is simple. Six months later, can your own sales team say the sentence without reading it?
Frequently asked questions
We already have a logo and a tagline. Is that positioning?
No. A tagline is what you say; positioning is the sentence a customer says about you when you are not in the room. If your team cannot answer “who are we willing to lose?” the identity is decoration on an undecided strategy — and the market will improvise its own sentence, usually about price.
Who needs to be in the workshop?
The people who can actually decide, which is normally fewer than the invitation list suggests. Positioning agreed by consensus tends to be positioning that offends nobody and moves nobody. Whoever will have to defend the answer to a board or a sales team should be in the room while it is being made.
What if we do not have a real differentiator?
Nearly every client believes that, and it is nearly always wrong. The work starts from what is already true: a founder’s history, a client nobody expects, a process that survived a hard year. Our own name is the example — Boujdyate translates from Moroccan Darija as goat, and GOAT is what the market already says about work it respects. That was there before we noticed it.
How do we know whether it worked?
One test above all: six months later, can your own sales team say the sentence without reading it? After that the signals are practical — shorter sales conversations, fewer price objections, and pages, decks and posts that have stopped contradicting each other. The positioning playbook for cross-border buyers covers the same test in more detail.