What makes us different

A lot of companies start sounding unusually earnest once the conversation turns to difference.

It often follows More marketing. The earlier mistakes about demand, targeting, brand, and performance have already narrowed what the business believes marketing can fix. Activity has filled the gap where strategy should have made choices.

At some point someone offers what sounds like the grown-up answer.

We just need to explain what makes us different.

It sounds sensible. If the market is not responding strongly enough, perhaps the problem is simply that the company has not articulated its value clearly enough. The homepage needs tightening. The pitch needs sharpening. Sales needs stronger messaging.

The category page needs a clearer comparison table. The ads need to state the differentiators more plainly. The implied diagnosis is simple: marketing needs better wording.

Positioning gets reduced to messaging.

The company starts treating a strategic choice as a copy problem.

That’s understandable because messaging is visible. A headline can be rewritten. A deck can be improved. A product page can be restructured. A script can be tightened.

Those are manageable tasks.

Positioning is more awkward.

It forces the company to decide what it really is in the mind of the market, which alternatives it wants to be judged against, which strengths it wants at the centre, and which buyers and buying situations matter most.

That is a much more consequential conversation. So many businesses retreat to language instead. They try to write their way out of a strategic ambiguity they have not resolved.

Positioning is not messaging

April Dunford makes the distinction directly: positioning is not messaging. In her framing, positioning sets the context that helps buyers understand what the product is, who it is for, what it competes with, and why its value matters.

Her core point is that the frame of reference matters because it shapes what buyers assume the product is, what alternatives they compare it with, and whether its strengths feel relevant in the first place.

That’s the central mistake this chapter is trying to expose.

A company can be perfectly clear and still be badly positioned.

In fact, some badly positioned companies are extremely clear. They explain exactly what they do, list their features honestly, and still fail to create much traction because the market frame around them makes their strengths look unimportant, interchangeable, or hard to value.

The business then blames the copy, commissions a homepage rewrite, and ends up with clearer words wrapped around the same positioning problem.

It helps to slow the terms down.

For the purposes of this book, positioning is the strategic choice about how the company wants to be understood in relation to the market - what category or frame it belongs to, what kind of problem it’s for, which alternatives it wants to beat, and why its strengths matter in that context. Messaging is the language used to express that choice in ads, decks, pages, emails, and conversations.

The distinction changes what kind of work the business thinks it’s doing.

A messaging problem usually calls for clearer words. A positioning problem may require a different frame, different strengths, different buying situations, or an admission that the company’s favourite explanation is harder for the market to understand than it seems internally.

That’s a much harder conversation, especially for founders.

Founders often know too much. They’re too close to the product’s full complexity, too attached to the original category story, too conscious of every edge case, and too invested in the complete picture.

Buyers don’t encounter the company that way. Buyers need a frame that helps them understand quickly why this thing matters and why its strengths are worth caring about.

If the frame is wrong, even strong messaging can end up explaining the company in a way that makes its advantages feel secondary.

Dunford’s positioning work is useful here because it keeps returning to one uncomfortable truth: when you declare what market you’re in, buyers make immediate assumptions about value, competitors, features, and price based on what they already know about that market. That means the wrong frame can make a genuinely strong product look weak before the conversation has properly started.

The wrong frame

Imagine a company with a secure communications product. Inside the business, the team knows it has more to offer than a standard email security tool.

It has authentication, auditability, delivery assurance, and capabilities that make it more suitable for regulated, sensitive communications. But the company keeps presenting itself in a broad frame like “secure email platform”, because that seems the simplest thing to say.

The messaging may be clear. The website may explain the product accurately. The deck may list all the differentiators.

And still the positioning may be weak.

Why? Because in the buyer’s mind, “secure email platform” may drag in a set of comparisons, expectations, prices, and use cases that make the company’s real strengths harder to appreciate.

The buyer may treat it as an IT tool, compare it with familiar email encryption products, look for feature parity, and judge the price against a category that does not fully capture the value of authenticated, auditable delivery.

The company has explained the product, but inside a frame that weakens the explanation.

That’s positioning.

And it’s why companies often feel stuck in a cycle of rewrites. The homepage gets “clearer” every six months. The pitch gets “tighter”. The product gets “reframed”. The copy gets “simpler”.

Yet the commercial effect remains weaker than hoped because the core strategic choice underneath has never really been made.

This is also why a lot of positioning discussions become strangely theological inside companies.

One group says the business needs stronger messaging. Another says the problem is category confusion. Another says the product is too broad. Another says buyers just don’t get it yet.

Sales says the pitch needs to be sharper. Product says marketing is oversimplifying. Founders say the nuance is being lost.

Often they’re all circling the same thing: the company has not yet chosen the best context for its strengths to make sense.

The LinkedIn B2B Institute’s 95-5 framing is one reason buying situations matter. Their work on Category Entry Points adds another useful layer: brands become easier to remember when they are linked to the situations that prompt purchase.

In practical terms, good positioning helps the brand come to mind in the right circumstances, instead of leaving differentiation as a claim on the page.

A positioning choice that can’t connect clearly to real buying situations is much harder to turn into mental availability.

That should make founders slightly suspicious of positioning exercises built only around internal phrasing.

A company can spend weeks choosing adjectives and still not answer the harder questions. What are we really being compared with? What context makes our advantages matter most?

Which buyers and buying situations are the most useful anchors for understanding us? What assumptions does our current framing accidentally invite?

Those are positioning questions. They come before messaging.

Company Copy vs Company Position

A side-by-side comparison makes this easier to see.

Take two software companies with very similar products.

Company Copy believes its problem is articulation. It commissions a homepage rewrite, updates the deck, tightens the ad copy, and trains sales on a cleaner script. Its core category frame stays the same. The same competitors remain in view. The same assumptions remain attached.

Buyers may indeed find the product description easier to read. But the business is still being understood in a way that puts its strongest advantages slightly out of place.

Company Position does some of that copy work too, but only after making a harder decision. It asks what frame of reference makes its strengths feel most valuable.

It looks at where the product wins most naturally, what alternatives buyers really compare it with, and which buying situations make its difference easiest to grasp. It may even choose a frame that’s slightly less familiar internally but much more useful externally.

Once that choice is made, the messaging gets easier because the context is doing some of the explanatory work.

From the outside, Company Copy can look busy and professional. There’s new language everywhere.

From the inside, Company Position may feel more disruptive because it’s changing the strategic context in which the words make sense.

This is why positioning feels heavier than a messaging rewrite. Real positioning forces decisions that close doors.

It may mean choosing one market frame, foregrounding one use case, accepting that a favourite feature is secondary, and admitting that the founder’s proudest detail may be a poor route into the market.

It may mean letting go of a category label that sounds prestigious internally but weakens the company commercially.

That is one reason businesses avoid it. Messaging refinement lets everyone stay attached to the full story.

Positioning asks the company to become more selective.

And selection can feel like loss.

There is also a second mistake hidden here. Many firms treat positioning as if it only matters at the point of explanation.

But good positioning also shapes pricing, sales confidence, competitive comparisons, creative direction, and channel choices.

Dunford’s work makes this point clearly when she describes positioning as the starting point for marketing and sales strategy, with headline writing downstream from that.

A weak position has costs beyond confusion. It can make the company seem more substitutable than it really is. It can force sales to work harder to create relevance manually in every conversation.

It can encourage product-heavy messaging because the frame itself is not doing enough. It can make premium pricing harder to defend because the buyer does not see the company in its most valuable context. It can weaken brand-building because the market does not have a stable set of cues for when to think of the business.

Bad positioning leaks everywhere.

This is one reason the chapter belongs here in the book.

A business that over-relies on capture, narrows targeting too aggressively, delays brand, splits brand from performance, and then inflates activity will eventually hit a wall of incoherence.

At that point “we need better positioning” is often true. But many companies then make the final mistake of treating that as a messaging project.

They produce cleaner words while leaving the underlying commercial context untouched.

The more useful approach takes longer than a rewrite, without being more complicated.

Start with the context in which the product’s strengths matter most. Choose the market frame that makes those strengths easiest to value.

Work out what alternatives buyers will naturally compare you with in that frame. Identify the buying situations where you most need to be thought of.

Then build messaging from there.

That sequence fits both Dunford’s positioning logic and the B2B Institute’s emphasis on buying situations and Category Entry Points. Dunford’s logic handles the frame. Category Entry Points handle the buying situations.

Together they push against the lazy idea that positioning is just the craft of saying things more elegantly.

The practical test

This is also where founders need to be careful not to turn “positioning” into an excuse for endless verbal churn.

Some companies are not under-positioned. They are under-committed.

They have already chosen a decent position, but they keep rewriting it before the market has had time to absorb it.

Good positioning should make messaging easier to repeat, not easier to reinvent.

That is the practical test. If the frame keeps changing every quarter, or sales and marketing cannot repeat it consistently, you may be looking at instability rather than refinement. If buyers understand the words and still undervalue the offer, the problem is probably the frame, not the copy.

Positioning is not the final wording of your difference. It is the strategic choice that makes your difference make sense.

And once a company accepts that, it often reaches for a new kind of caution.

When the next decision is bigger than wording, many businesses start looking for something external to make the call feel safer.

That is usually when they say they need more research first.