How to position your business to be interesting again.
There are two themes to my social media right now. Either businesses are shutting down, largely citing market saturation, or businesses are announcing record performances.
And the brands that are winning are those that are actually interesting.
Similar to the "whitewashing" of branding that's been discussed, where every brand has begun to visually look the same (see minimal colours, stripped-back logos, bold rather than intricate details), every brand has seemingly begun to sound the same too.
It's easy to blame this on AI, but this problem arrived long before it became standard for ChatGPT to have evidently thought up someone's strapline.
In an effort to appeal to everyone, brands have flattened themselves. Rolled themselves so thin in order to cover all the corners of an already broad target market that there's no room left to stand for anything.
So how do we change that? How do we make businesses interesting again?
To start, you need positioning that doesn't suck.
Every positioning framework I've seen simply touches the surface of what a business does, and could be written by at least 20% of their market.
Think about the cereal aisle in your local supermarket. Rows of cardboard boxes decorated in a wheat-coloured shade, likely displaying some form of cartoon character, and a vague statement about how there's no added sugar, which is only technically true because there's so much sugar already included that it would be a health risk to add any more.
They all look exactly the same, and the Kellogg's and Nestle mission statements reflect exactly that:
Take away the brand name at the start, and those descriptions are completely interchangeable. They could belong to either brand, and probably many more in the cereal category.
Yawn.
Then let's compare this to Surreal Cereal. The brightly coloured box picturing a mixed-media graphic and very unique claims of 0g sugar and >15g protein.
This is reflected in their mission "to make breakfast playful and bring back the childhood cereals people love by rebooting them with healthy, high-protein, and zero-sugar ingredients for adults".
Surreal identified a gap they could own, at the cross-over of cereal x playful x healthy (interestingly also targeting adults rather than children). In an aisle where all options were either healthy but very boring and cardboard-like, or fun but at the expense of high-sugar, they managed to own a unique space in arguably one of the most saturated food markets.
This is the power of positioning your business around your intersection.
And luckily for you, I have a whole positioning framework covering exactly how you should define yours.
How to define your positioning
1. Evaluate the scene
Ultimately, your positioning is how your brand is perceived in the minds of your audience, relative to their other options. This means you have to start by being clear on who they're comparing you to, so you can position yourself differently.
A) Start with what you actually do, so you know the space you're looking at. Your capability. Be that a product you sell (picnic mats, activewear), your service (gardening, personal training), or entertainment (comedy club, Korean restaurant). Positioning has to sit somewhere, and this is your somewhere.
B) Then map the queue. Look around you in that space, and list out everything your customer could choose instead of you. Make sure this is the whole line-up: direct competitors, yes, but also adjacent options. For example, if someone wants to learn a language, they could decide between your 1:1 tutoring services, a language app, a two-week intensive course, a book, or maybe even a trip to the country that speaks the language.
2. Find your pull
You stand out from the crowd with a specific pull. One or two ingredients that, when combined with your capability, create a unique space in the overlap.
There are two kinds of ingredients you can add.
A) A twist:
Your distinctive take on the capability. It can be a product variation (a food flavour nobody else is making), a new mechanism (personalised plans delivered through an app), an emotional register (heavy-metal irreverence around a can of water), a price posture (affordable sustainability). Anything that makes your delivery of that capability unique.
Importantly, a twist only counts if a direct rival doesn't have it. Meaning anything along the lines of "high-quality", "easy" or "low cost" won't work because a competitor will likely already be claiming that.
Instead, think about how:
What's a distinctive twist you could apply to your capability? Write out any ideas you have.
B) A cause:
Your cause is the belief underneath your business. This could be as serious or as fun a cause as you'd like, but it needs to be something someone could genuinely disagree with for it to be a cause you can fight for. In other words, "we believe in high quality" is not a cause, because no one is going to disagree.
This is absolutely optional. If you don't have something good to fight for, then don't include it. All of those examples above (Runna, GoPro, Liquid Death, Surreal, Duolingo) have successful positioning without a cause they're fighting for. And a half-hearted cause bolted on would only serve to make their positioning worse.
But there are some good examples where this does work:
If you do have a cause you want to fight for, now's the time to jot them down too.
3. Define your gap
Your intersection is a combination of your capability and your twist and/or cause. The whole point of your positioning is that it lives in the overlap, so now it's time to find that space.
A) Start by outlining more than one intersection. Take all the ingredients you generated and combine them in a few different ways. There's no need to definitely marry the first idea. You're hunting for the combination with the most pull, and you won't know which that is until you've laid a few options side by side.
B) Test those options.
Your intersection has to be desired, rare, and real for it to be effective.
Desired: Is there a specific, nameable crowd who would actively welcome this, and how big is it? (Even better if this is a currently underrepresented target customer within that market)
Rare: Is this genuinely a space nobody else is holding? Can it be easily replicated after you launch, and if so do you have ideas to keep yourself ahead?
Real: Can this intersection actually live in the product, not just the marketing? It doesn't have to be fully built yet, but it has to be credibly makeable, and you should leave this step with concrete ideas for how: in the product, in the packaging, in a long-term roadmap. (Look to Tony's Chocolonely for my #1 example where they have messages about their cause in the packaging, reflect their values in their own supply chain, and have even shaped their chocolate bar unequally to reflect the unequal representation in the Cocoa industry).
C) Write it down.
Now it's time to assemble it all together! You can roll up all the decisions you've made into this statement structure:
For [the specific crowd who wants X], [your brand] is the [category] that [twist and/or cause]. Unlike [what they'd otherwise choose], we [your intersection]. And it's real because [proof in the product].
Need some examples?
Tony's Chocolonely is for chocolate lovers who don't want their treat funding exploitation, so Tony's is the chocolate brand out to end slavery in cocoa. Unlike the big names that stay quiet about their supply chains, we make bold, traceable bars and campaign loudly for a fair industry. And it's real because even the bar is cast in uneven chunks to represent the inequality we're fighting.
Runna is for amateur runners chasing a race goal who can't justify a private coach, so Runna is the app that gives you a personalised plan built as a real coach would. Unlike generic free plans and pricey human coaches, we deliver expert, adapting training through your phone for a fraction of the cost. And it's real because the plans genuinely tailor to your times, goals, and race date.
Let's save the world from boring businesses.
I promise you the world does not need another sustainable activewear business (especially that still uses mostly polyester). Or another high sugar cereal. Or another standard coffee shop that also sells matcha.
We need businesses that are memorable, and finding your intersection is your way out.
So combine those two or three ideas you genuinely own, and find that overlapping space that only you can fill. Then build something real in the middle of it.
Because in business, the safe, sensible, narrower choice is almost always just a longer word for forgettable, and that's definitely not the way to success.
