“What is our positioning — and is it still relevant?”
Over the past year, we’ve seen a marked increase in enquiries from global B2B organisations looking to sense check, refine or completely rethink how they’re positioned. Not because something has necessarily broken, but because there’s a growing awareness that even well-established propositions can drift out of alignment with the people they’re trying to reach.
What positioning actually is
Positioning, in a B2B context, isn’t a strapline or a neatly crafted paragraph on a website.
It’s the space you occupy in the mind of your customer.
More specifically — it’s how clearly they understand what you do, when they need it,and why they would choose you over anyone else.
The role it plays in growth
Strong positioning doesn’t just shape perception. It shapes behaviour.
It determines whether you’re found in the first place — through search, through recommendation, through reputation. Positioning influences whether your messaging resonates, whether it holds attention, whether it converts interest into enquiry.
It also aligns internally and gives sales and marketing teams something consistent to build from. Then, whether it’s leadership or delivery messaging, there will be a thread that makes it recognisably belong to that business.
How you articulate it
This is where many organisations fail. Internally, articulation often feels clear, logical and even obvious.
But internal language has a habit of becoming insular. It reflects how you describe your expertise — not how your customer understands their problem. Which then leads to a more important question.
Do you say what your customers are actually looking for?
Not what you believe they should value.
Not what your sector typically emphasises.
But the specific words, priorities and triggers they use when they go to market.
Because slight shifts in language can fundamentally alter whether you’re discovered, whether your message lands and whether it drives action.
Why the renewed focus now
Differentiation is part of it. We’ve written about differentiation here (How brand strategy process can help you define differentiation) and here (Is it time to stand up and stand out)
But what we’re seeing now goes deeper. There’s a growing recognition that assumptions — particularly in technically specialised industries — can drift out of date or have never been tested in the real world of customers.
Markets evolve, customer priorities shift and new competitors reframe the conversation.
Leading to customer expectations sharpening.
Without an external sense check, it’s easy to continue speaking confidently, in the way you always have, while gradually fewer people listen and connect.
That’s often when positioning stops working. Not because it was wrong to begin with, but because it was never revisited.
So the question becomes less about creating something new and more about understanding what, if anything, has changed.
Do you know…
What your ideal customer’s actually looking for now?
How are they articulating it?
What do they notice — or not notice — about you?
And how do they truly perceive your competitors?
The danger of assumption
We all do it.
We assume we know why customers choose us.
We assume we understand how we’re perceived.
We assume our strengths are visible.
But assumption is a fragile foundation.
Particularly when the differences between being chosen and being overlooked can come down to nuance. A slight misalignment in language. A missed emphasis. A strength that isn’t expressed in the way the market recognises. These small shifts can have significant consequences.
Why we still start with conversation
After all these years, we still believe the most reliable way to understand your positioning is to speak to the people who experience it.
Your buyers.
Not through surveys alone. Not through analytics dashboards. But through real conversations — open, exploratory, and human. Because the most valuable insight rarely arrives in a perfectly structured answer.
We learn most when in those conversations – insight can emerge in the pauses, in the contradictions and in the moments where someone reconsiders what they’ve just said. As an external, objective voice, we’re able to access something different. There’s no internal context to navigate, no perceived agenda to manage. People tend to speak more freely and honestly. And that honesty is where the real value sits.
We’ve written more about the role of objectivity in this process (The outsider advantage) in our separate article — and why it continues to matter.
Where AI fits and where it doesn’t
AI is playing a growing role in how insight is gathered and processed. But there is a layer of human nuance that remains difficult to replicate.
Do you think a customer would share the same level of candour with a bot?
Would they deviate from a structured path, reflect mid-sentence, reveal something unexpected?
How could you build trust in quite the same way?
Perhaps in time, some of that gap will narrow. But for now, when the goal is to uncover truth — not just answers, but meaning — human conversation still holds a distinct advantage.
The language gap and the risk of misalignment
In technical sectors, complexity is often a marker of credibility.
And rightly so. Expertise matters. Depth matters. Precision matters.
But where we see challenges emerge is in the subtle misalignment between what an organisation knows and what its buyer actually needs to hear. Because not every decision maker is looking for the same level of detail.
Some know the challenge they have. They’re clear on the outcome they need. What they’re looking for is confidence — that your solution will solve their problem, and that you’ve done it before. Proof matters more than process and reassurance carries more weight than explanation.
Pages of scientific detail don’t necessarily strengthen the case. In some instances, they dilute it.
Equally, there are audiences — often highly qualified engineers or technical specialists — for whom that depth is essential. They’re not looking for a simplified narrative or a marketing layer. They want to see the mechanics. The specificity. The evidence that you understand their world, their constraints, their standards.
They are frequently a critical part of the decision-making chain. And if their level of scrutiny isn’t met, the conversation rarely progresses.
So the challenge isn’t simplification, it’s alignment.
Understanding who you’re speaking to, what they value, and how they assess credibility — then responding accordingly, without losing the integrity of what you do.
Brand as a barrier
We see this dynamic in our own work as well. When we’re conducting interviews as part of a positioning process, we rarely ask about “brand” directly. Not because it isn’t important, but because, in a B2B context, it’s rarely how decisions are framed. Even when the individuals we’re speaking to are consumers of brands in their personal lives, their professional lens is different. More practical and more outcome-driven.
So we adapt. Instead, in interviews we don’t ask what the customer feels about the brand they work with because it becomes a barrier. Instead, we ask how that company performs under pressure, why they choose to work with them and what genuinely makes them different.
Because positioning should always start with the audience — not the internal language used to describe it.
When that happens, language stops being a barrier. Insight becomes clearer. And positioning becomes something that connects — rather than something that simply exists.
A more human future
If anything, the rise of AI has made one thing clearer. The need for genuine human connection hasn’t diminished — it’s intensified. Which makes the role of positioning even more important.
Because at its core, positioning is about understanding people.
How they think.
How they choose.
What they trust.
And ensuring that when they encounter your business, they recognise something that feels relevant, credible and clear.
Not because you’ve said it perfectly.
But because you’ve understood them properly.
So perhaps the most useful question isn’t what is our positioning?
It’s this.