Eight rules for brand positioning

And why AI won’t give you them: brand positioning as the acid test for backing things that don’t exist yet.

A premium brand asked us to help set its course for the next decade. It sold something people buy rarely, pay a lot for, and live with for years. The obvious answer was self-expression: confidence, standing out, making a statement. It’s what Instagram and lifestyle magazines hold up as aspirational, it’s what the client expected, and it’s what any AI would tell a premium brand to stand for.

Customers saw it differently. Listen properly to people making a big, lasting purchase and the overriding feeling isn’t excitement. It’s fear of getting it wrong, of spending a lot and living with the mistake. To them, a premium brand isn’t permission to take risks. It’s insurance against regret. That changes what a high price is buying. And the proof that mattered most wasn’t a grand claim. It was one small, concrete detail about how the product was made.

None of that was in the data. It came from knowing how premium really works in high-regret purchases well beyond this one, from bringing each idea to life as something people could live with rather than a statement to judge, and from having the decision-makers there to watch the obvious idea fall flat and a less obvious, more powerful one take hold.

No AI would have suggested it. In The past won’t tell you what will win the future, we argued that ideas like this come from deep knowledge, a method for producing strong ideas, and a way of bringing people with you. Brand positioning is where all three get tested hardest.

A positioning is a big, hard-to-reverse decision about something that doesn’t exist yet, and the whole organisation has to believe in it. It also matters more than it has for years. Targeting turns out to be far less precise than it looks, major brands have been moving money back from performance marketing into brand, and it’s meaningful difference, not just fame, that lets a brand charge more. With AI now producing endless variants of every message, a clear centre has never been more valuable.

And yet Mark Ritson reckons around eight in ten brand strategies make no measurable difference. Usually they’re a list of the same generic values as everyone else’s, or a hunt for a single USP, when what customers respond to is a brand that’s clearly better at something they care about.

Ask any AI model for the rules of brand positioning and you’ll get a perfectly sensible list: know your audience, find a point of difference, be credible, be consistent, align the organisation. None of it is wrong. But it’s the same list your competitors got, because different AI models give strikingly similar answers to the same questions. A tool that steers everyone to the same answer is an odd choice for a job whose whole purpose is to be different. It’s genuinely useful for drafting and early screening. It shouldn’t make the decision.

Here are eight rules the list leaves out.

1. Do the homework before you ask anyone anything. Use the competitors’ service yourself and talk to the people who’ll have to deliver the promise. Consumers alone shouldn’t dictate a positioning.

2. Go looking for the edges, not the average. Develop deliberately different slants, because the middle is where every competitor already lives.

3. Know whether you have a positioning or just a strand. A real positioning is clear about who it’s for, the need, the benefit, one or two tangible proofs, the brand’s character and who it’s up against. A strand needs building, not testing.

4. Beware bear traps and waffle. One word with the wrong resonance can sink a good idea, and waffle smothers it just as surely.

5. Don’t show people a strategy statement. They’ll turn into amateur marketing consultants. Show them what the brand would feel like, pushed far enough to provoke.

6. Be on your guard against polite interest. People are kind to ideas that leave them cold. Read the hesitation, and listen for the moment someone describes the idea better than you did.

7. Judge it against tomorrow, not today. Agree upfront what motivating, distinctive and credible mean for this brand, then ask: is it ahead of the market, could a competitor copy it, and can this company deliver it?

8. Build it with the people who’ll have to back it. The tighter the words, the harder they are to commit to, so keep decision-makers involved throughout. And the job isn’t done until the staff believe it as much as the ads do.

The rules have taken us in some unexpected directions. We’ve seen a strong offer held back by a single abstract word that invited the one question the brand couldn’t answer. And we’ve seen four positioning statements that looked perfectly respectable in the boardroom all sound slightly guarded to customers, with the favourite meaning two quite different things, only one of which made the brand a leader.

Neither of these would have shown up in a survey. They came out because experienced people worked the ideas through with real customers, with the decision-makers there to see it.

Most research is the exam a positioning sits at the end. It works far better as the workshop where the positioning gets built. That means bringing ideas to life, reworking them with real customers between sessions, and judging them against a yardstick agreed upfront. In our KSBR Live work, senior teams go further and pitch the ideas to customers themselves. AI helps with desk research, drafting and stimulus. The judgement stays with people who’ve done this many times.

The pay-off is faster decisions, fewer expensive mistakes, and leaders who keep backing the idea when things get hard, because they saw for themselves why it works.

KSBR Brand Futures. Customer strategies. Shared conviction. Bold decisions.