Something's shifted over the last couple of months. More prospects are getting in touch and naming positioning specifically, right from the first call, as the reason they want to talk to us.
It's a small sample. Could easily be a blip. But it's happened enough times that we've started asking why.
One theory: AI. It's flattened a lot of what used to take real time and real cost to produce well: a website, a deck, a set of sales one-pagers. Now they take an afternoon and a decent prompt. Good for speed. Less good for distinctiveness, because a hundred businesses using the same tools tend to produce work that reads the same way. We made this same point about AI content a few months back: the tools make it faster to produce work that sounds like everyone else's. The same thing seems to be happening to positioning. Businesses that never had to think hard about how they're different are suddenly turning out output that makes them look exactly like everyone else. That's uncomfortable enough to pick up the phone about.
Maybe that's the reason. We'll know more if the enquiries keep coming. But the uptick has put a second thing in front of us, and it might matter more: how differently everyone understands the word "positioning" in the first place.
It's a bit like "brand" that way. Ask ten people what it means and you'll get ten different answers, most of them half right.
So here's ours.
Positioning is how you explain what you do, so the right buyer gets it fast.
It answers three questions, in that order: what is this, who is it for, why should they care. Get those three right and the website, the sales deck, the pitch and the ads all get easier to write, because they're working from the same answer instead of inventing a new one each time. Put more bluntly, positioning helps the right buyer answer one question fast: does this save me money, or make me money?
Worth separating two things people conflate here. Brand positioning is the whole company, built on vision and values, answering "why choose us at all." It only moves when the business fundamentally changes. Product positioning is one offer, answering "why this, right now," and it shifts as the market or the buyer's needs shift. The two have to agree. Product positioning applies the brand's logic to a specific choice. It doesn't invent its own. If they contradict, that's a brand architecture problem. (For the fuller breakdown of that split, see our piece "What Does Brand Positioning Really Mean?")
Getting to that clarity is rarely quick. It takes people from across the business in a room: product knows what it does, sales knows what buyers actually ask, marketing knows what lands. Done properly, it produces three or four value themes. Not ten. A laundry list nobody can remember is a laundry list nobody will ever use on a call.
One thing we saw recently stuck with us. A prospect shared their positioning work: they'd mapped every competitor onto a couple of axes, then planted their own flag in the empty square. Neat exercise, but the wrong instinct. Positioning has nothing to do with where competitors sit. It's about knowing, firmly, what value you create for your customers. There might be overlap with other businesses. Your offer stays distinct because you can say what it is, who it's for, and what it's worth, plainly, and the chances are the businesses on that grid can't.
We know this work pays off because clients tell us. One recent client doubled their average contract value after we did the positioning work together. They could finally say, clearly and consistently, why they were worth what they were asking.
So maybe AI is pushing more businesses to confront this. Maybe "positioning" just gets used so loosely that most people have never actually sat down and defined it. Either way, the pattern in the work stays the same: the businesses that get specific about what they are, who it's for, and what it's worth, end up with an easier sale. That's the part worth chasing, whatever's bringing people to our door.