The Positioning Muddle

Ask a founder, call her Dana, the difference between positioning, branding and marketing, and watch the three words melt into one. She uses them interchangeably in a single breath: “we need to fix our positioning, so we’re rebranding, to help our marketing problem.” Each time, a different agency has told her a different one is the answer, and she has bought all three, in sequence, and still cannot say what her company is or where her problems lie.

If you are trying to sort positioning vs branding vs marketing, the fastest way through is to see them as three different jobs, done in order. Positioning is the decision about what you are and who you are for. Branding is how that decision looks and feels. Marketing is how you carry it to people. Get the order wrong and you spend on the last two to paper over a gap in the first.

Three jobs, not three synonyms

Positioning is a choice, made once and revisited rarely: of all the things you could be, which one do you claim, and for whom. It is a sentence, not a design. “The project tool for people who hate project tools” is a position. It commits you, and it excludes people on purpose, which is exactly why it works.

Branding is the wardrobe that position wears: the name, the colours, the tone of voice, the logo. Good branding makes a position recognisable and consistent. It cannot create a position that is not there. A new colour palette on an undecided company just makes the confusion look tidier.

Marketing is the distribution: the ads, the emails, the posts, the reach. It takes whatever you have decided and puts it in front of people. That is the catch. Marketing amplifies whatever it is given. Aim it at a clear position and it compounds. Aim it at a muddle and it broadcasts the muddle, faster and wider.

Why the order is the whole thing

Dana’s mistake was not laziness. It was sequence. She kept buying branding and marketing, the visible, purchasable things, to solve a positioning problem, which is the invisible one, because it is a decision only she can make.

You can hire someone to design a brand. You can hire someone to run the marketing. You cannot hire someone to decide what your company is about. That is the one job that does not outsource, and it is the one every other job is waiting on. Rebrand an undecided company and you get a tidier version of “not sure what they do.” Market it harder and more people arrive at the same shrug, sooner.

The word underneath all three is narrative. Positioning is the story you have chosen; branding is how it is dressed; marketing is how it travels. Skip the choosing and there is nothing for the other two to carry. That choice, deciding what the thing is really about before dressing it or shipping it, is the edit in the Narrative Read, and choosing the one thing a stranger can hold is the everything pitch.

Positioning, branding, marketing, in that order. Decide first. Dress it and send it second. Do it the other way round and you are paying two people to amplify a decision you never made. Aubrey North seeks to help you with the former so that you’re free to chase the latter.

More problems seen from inside a business in the Archetype lane.