05 Aug The Positioning Lie — The Flawed Model
Why starting with the audience feels right — but often leads straight to sameness.
Why starting with the audience feels right — but often leads straight to sameness.
For the last decade, one framework has dominated brand positioning.
It promises clarity, strategy, and alignment.
It gets packaged into decks, slapped onto whiteboards, and praised in workshops for “bringing everything together.”
Here's the Truth — It's a Trap.
This model—whether you call it a golden circle, brand pyramid, or whichever Venn-inspired sketch you’ve seen—was never designed to build leadership brands.
It’s built for consensus, not conviction.
Optimized for buy-in, not boldness.
It gives the illusion of strategy, while keeping you safely in the middle of the road.
It feels like it’s working… until it’s time to launch.
Until the campaign flops.
Until your competitors suddenly sounds exactly like you or you like them.
Until your internal team still doesn’t know what the brand really stands for.
It starts with data—lots of it or lack thereof.
You gather audience insights: who they are, what they say they want, what they like and don’t like.
You scan competitors: their positioning, messaging, perceived strengths and weaknesses.
You review your brand: existing reputation, ratings, visual identity.
Then the “strategists” disappears into a room to “analyze” all this. What they’re really doing is searching for overlap—a safe spot where brand, audience, and market intersect, supposedly untouched by competitors. This becomes the guiding idea for the brand’s positioning.
Most agencies hold their strategic positioning models close to their chest. However, it’s evident that a significant majority have adopted frameworks where brand strategies heavily rely on audience and competitor analysis as the foundation. While understanding a brand’s audience and competition is of great importance, in this model, it’s being used in a way that undermines a brand’s truth, values, story, pillars, etc. It strips the soul and feeling out of what a brand is—and what it could be. In many cases, this positioning model either dismisses or neglects to explore who and what a brand aspires to be, focusing instead on data-driven insights. This approach stems from the belief that there’s insufficient data to support a brand’s aspirational identity.
Speaking from experience, some agencies even go as far as persuading businesses not to pursue their brand aspirations because the data doesn’t support it. Yes, data is important and should be analyzed—but data can’t tell the whole story. Occasionally, that data can be misdirected, limiting a brand’s true potential before it even has a chance to grow.
What emerges isn’t insight—it’s a broad generalization.
An uninspired, safe positioning statement that sounds like every other brand in the category.
A statement that offers no spark, no motivation, no direction to build a disruptive brand.
More than that, this approach:
You’re left with a “positioned” brand that lacks clarity, conviction, and leadership.
This isn’t a flaw in execution.
It’s a flaw in the model itself.
It’s a model designed to avoid risk and complexity, not to create category-defining leadership.
It rewards playing it safe over standing for something.
If you want to lead—if you want your brand to matter—this model won’t get you there.
Because clarity doesn’t come from consensus.
Differentiation doesn’t come from data alone.
And leadership never comes from staying in the middle of the road.
But if you’re building a disruptive brand — or even just a clear one — that’s not a strategy.
That’s a stall tactic.
Why starting with the audience feels right — but often leads straight to sameness.
© 2025 Barrett Reynolds, a Reynolds Family Brands LLC company. All Rights Reserved.
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