I've seen a lot of brand positioning work.
Some of it is genuinely smart.
Sometimes so smart that I'm not quite sure what the brand is actually saying.
A positioning project tends to produce a lot of things.
Brand purpose.
Brand essence.
Brand promise.
Values.
Personality.
Mission.
Vision.
Then a beautiful brand book.
Everything makes sense.
Every sentence sounds good on its own.
But when you put it all together, I often find myself asking:
So who are you, exactly?
I used to like making things complicated too.
Maybe that's what happens when you've been doing this for a long time.
You start thinking:
How can a brand possibly be reduced to one sentence?
It can't.
But consumers don't have to read your 80-page brand book.
They might see a product.
A poster.
A sentence someone sends them.
Or your ad for three seconds at an airport.
They're not going to study your brand architecture.
So the question isn't really:
"Can we explain the brand completely?"
It's:
"Can someone understand, quickly enough, why they should remember you?"
These days, when I work on positioning, I increasingly like taking things away.
Remove the things that are true but don't actually help.
Remove the things every competitor could say.
Remove the words that sound sophisticated but nobody remembers.
Then see what's left.
Sometimes it's one very simple sentence.
So simple that, at first, it feels almost too ordinary.
Maybe it is.
But if it's accurate, and the team can actually use it to make decisions, then it has value.
Good positioning doesn't always make a brand sound more interesting.
Sometimes it simply means the brand no longer has to keep explaining itself.
That's become one of my favourite tests.
If your positioning needs to keep explaining why it's right, it may not be doing its job yet.
