Cole Mays · August 2026 · 9 minute read
I was researching a company last year and wrote down “their origin story is their differentiator.” Then I stopped, because it isn’t true. Every company has an origin. A thing everyone has can’t set anyone apart.
That sentence sent me back through the positioning work I’d run, because most brand positioning makes a version of the same mistake. It reaches for something that sounds distinctive, writes it down, and calls it a position. The framework below runs the other direction. It starts with what your company already does, and it ends with a position you can actually keep.
Brand positioning is the strategic decision about where your brand stands: who it’s for, what it promises them, and why that promise is yours to make. Al Ries and Jack Trout planted the discipline’s flag decades ago: the position lives in your prospect’s mind, next to every alternative they could choose instead. What you’re deciding is what you want to be found there.
Most positioning frameworks hand you the statement template first.
For [audience] who [need], [company] is the [category] that [benefit].
The template is fine, and I’ll show you where it fits at the end. The trap is filling it in on day one, because a template can only arrange what you feed it, and on day one what you feed it is aspiration. That’s how five competitors in the same market end up with five interchangeable positioning statements, each one describing the company its founder wishes they were running.
The statement is the last artifact of the work, and writing it first is how it ends up empty.
Why most positioning work fails
Every company is already running on a principle, whether anyone has named it or not.
The company didn’t walk into the positioning workshop empty. It has been making decisions for years, and in those decisions a governing principle was created even if nobody wrote it down. If nobody chose what it was, it got chosen anyway, by what got rewarded last quarter, or what the loudest customer demanded, or, what I see most often, what the founder is afraid of.
So when a team declares a new position without ever surfacing the one that’s been operating, they end up with two principles running at once.
The declared one, aspirational and true to how people want to see themselves.
And the operative one, holding the wheel through every decision the company actually makes.
The operative one wins, because it’s the one the company has practiced.
A year later the new positioning feels hollow, the story still changes depending on who tells it, and everybody decides the exercise was a waste.
Simon Sinek is right, in Start With Why, that companies have a why and that it should govern everything. What I’d add is that you don’t invent the why in a workshop. You recover it from behavior, and until the principle you actually run on has been brought into the light, it stays in charge.
That’s the failure underneath most abandoned positioning work, and it’s why this framework spends three of its five steps looking backward before it commits to anything.
The framework
This is the positioning work inside our Lighthouse Method, the process we run every engagement on. Five moves. Fair warning about the shape of it: three of the five look inward at your company’s behavior, because that’s the half most positioning work skips. The market gets its say, and I’ll show you exactly where, but it doesn’t get the first word.
Move 01
Find the principle you already run on
The question I open with isn’t “what’s your why.” That question retrieves the About page. The question is: what does this company behave from, whether or not anyone has said it out loud?
Answer it from decisions, because behavior is where the truth lives. Where does the money go when nobody’s watching? What gets celebrated internally? What does the team apologize for? Read enough decisions and a pattern surfaces. Sometimes what’s underneath is beautiful and nobody has given it words yet, and sometimes it has to be named and dethroned before anything new can lead. Either way you have to see it first.
People can’t operate without a principle, and neither can a company full of them, so the question never comes back empty. The finding is never that a company has no principle. The finding is which principle is operating, and whether it’s the one you would choose.
Move 02
Hunt the refusals
A real position generates refusals. If your company has never turned anything down, there’s no position yet, whatever the website says.
So go looking for friction: money you turned down, or a customer you fired or wished you had, or a corner you refused to cut when cutting it would have been easier and nobody would have known.
I felt this one before I could explain it. Near the beginning of my shift from marketing into branding, I turned down good money from a client who wanted a workhorse instead of a partner. My gut said no before I had any language for why, and finding the language taught me more about what Neuma is than anything I could have written in a planning session.
Collect three or four of those stories and listen for the phrase that repeats across them. That repeated phrase is raw material for the promise, because it’s the principle showing itself under pressure, which is the only place it can’t perform.
Move 03
Separate what’s essential from what’s circumstantial
The history you just gathered contains two things tangled together, and the framework only works if you pull them apart.
Some of what you find is essential: change it and the company becomes someone else. Some of it is circumstantial: the conditions of the founding, the first market, the service line that paid the bills. Jim Collins draws this line in Built to Last, preserve the core and stimulate progress, and the test I use for which is which is recurrence. What showed up early under necessity and kept governing across years of changed circumstances is core. What appeared once and never governed again was circumstance. Trace the origin, then trace the history, and follow which patterns survive.
When the people in the room disagree about which is which, write both down and go back to the record. The decisions settle what the memories argue about.
This step is what keeps the framework from becoming nostalgia. You’re allowed to develop a clearer, more ambitious position than the one your history handed you. You’re just not allowed to build it in the dark.
Move 04
Name the promise
Now the work turns generative, and I’ll be straight with you about this step: it’s the hardest one to run from inside your own company, because you’re being asked to read water you’ve been swimming in for years. Here’s the move.
Take the phrase that kept repeating across your refusal stories and aim it at your customer. Ask who your customer becomes because of you, and write the phrase as a commitment to that person. Two definitions sit on either side of what you’re building. The designer Brian Collins describes a brand as a promise kept over time, and Alex Hormozi describes it as an association in the customer’s mind. Both are right, because they’re the input and the output of the same machine. The promise is what you feed it. The association is what compounds. Positioning is deciding what to feed it.
Then test what you’ve written against three traits. It’s lived: your company is already half-keeping it, which the refusal stories prove. It’s memorable: your team can repeat it, and a customer can feel it inside five seconds on your website. And it’s ownable, which is where the market finally enters. April Dunford makes the sharpest version of the point: a position is always relative to the alternatives your customer would actually use instead. So hold the promise up against those alternatives and against what your competitors already claim. A promise that three competitors could credibly make is a category requirement, and a thing everyone has can’t set anyone apart.
Our first client is a Colorado packaging manufacturer, a full print shop run by a man with forty years of paper behind him. When we met, the story was all equipment and capability. But the stories he kept coming back to weren’t about the machines. They were about small brands: the sample in a founder’s hands before a full production run, the thousand-unit run that lets a small company hold its product in real packaging without betting the year on it. The promise underneath those stories was that great products deserve great packaging, and the position that fell out of it was the packaging partner craft brands grow with, instead of one more box manufacturer. Same shop, same equipment, a completely different position, and none of it was invented. It was recognized.
The same move at a different scale: Happy Crew Coffee House, a mission-driven coffee house we’ve worked with for years, runs on the promise that everyone matters and belongs. The founder was saying a version of that sentence long before we ever worked together. We named it and built everything on it.
Move 05
Commit, then convert it into a question
A position isn’t real until it’s written down and until it filters decisions. So the last move produces two artifacts.
First, the commitment: the position stated plainly, in the founder’s own words, with the audience and the promise named. This is where the classic positioning statement template finally earns its place, if you want it. By now it has something true to arrange.
Second, and this is the one most frameworks skip: convert the promise into a question and hand it to your team. Happy Crew’s promise becomes “does this help someone experience that they matter and belong?” That question gets run against the new menu item, the hiring decision, the email before it goes out. The founder’s actual language matters here, because a filter the founder can’t say in their sleep is a filter the team will never use.
Then test it before you trust it. Take three or four real decisions from the last few months and run them through the question. If the filter produces the answers you actually made, without strain, you’ve found the position. If it requires interpretation, it isn’t the position yet. Keep digging.
If you only keep one part of this, keep these. They’re the whole framework in interrogative form.
01
02
03
04
05
What a real position buys you
The payoff isn’t a sharper tagline. When a company gets clear on who it is, it stops sprinting at everything, every channel, every trend, every campaign that worked for somebody else, and starts spending itself where the position gives it an advantage. The deck, the website, and the sales calls start saying the same thing, and deals stop dying in the gap between them.
The steadiness is also what lets you adapt. The thing that lets a brand change is the part of it that never changes. When the promise is deep and held, the campaigns and the products are free to move, even who you sell to can move, and the company still feels like itself. A company that finds itself repositioning every two years is usually treating drift, and the drift came from a core that was never deep enough to hold.
Position from what’s true, and the revisions that come later land on expression instead of identity.
Where to go from here
If you want to run this yourself, start with step one this week. Ask the behave-from question about your own company, and write down what you see before you write down what you want.
And if you’d rather have someone run it with you, this framework is the front half of how we work at Neuma. It’s most of what a brand strategy engagement with us looks like, and if the gap between your business and your brand has grown wide enough that positioning alone won’t close it, that’s usually the sign your business has outgrown its brand, which is the problem our rebrand work exists for.
