When positioning projects don’t deliver the impact everyone hoped for, it’s tempting to assume the positioning itself wasn’t quite right. In my experience, that’s rarely the real issue. More often, the positioning is sound, but the organization never fully aligned around what it meant or what it required people to do differently.
A positioning statement can look compelling on paper, earn unanimous approval in the final presentation, and still begin to unravel as teams start putting it into practice. Medical interprets it one way, commercial another and marketing through a third lens. Everyone agrees with the words, but not necessarily with the decisions those words are meant to drive.
That’s because positioning isn’t ultimately about creating a clever statement. It’s about enabling better decisions. Decisions about where to compete, what opportunity to pursue, what your brand should stand for and, just as importantly, what it shouldn’t. The statement itself is simply the articulation of those decisions.
Why alignment can’t be left until the end
Most positioning projects include an alignment workshop towards the end. By then, the research has been completed, the thinking has been developed and a recommended direction has emerged. The workshop is often intended to gain agreement before the project concludes. But agreement and alignment aren’t quite the same thing.
Alignment is built through participation, not presentation. People are far more likely to support a strategic direction when they have been involved in exploring the evidence, challenging assumptions and understanding the trade-offs behind the final decisions. That doesn’t mean every opinion carries equal weight. The customer truth and the evidence must always remain the anchor. What matters is that people understand why the choices have been made and feel confident applying them long after the project has finished.
What workshops are really for
Workshops are often seen as opportunities to generate ideas or sense-check recommendations. Whilst those activities have their place, I think their greatest value lies elsewhere.
The best workshops surface conversations that organizations often don’t have. They expose where different functions are working from different assumptions, where teams are using the same language to mean different things, and where priorities that appear aligned on the surface are actually pulling in different directions. Those conversations aren’t always comfortable, but they’re often where the most important strategic progress is made.
One pattern I’ve noticed is that the teams who leave feeling most aligned aren’t necessarily those who reached agreement the fastest. More often, they’re the teams who spent time exploring the difficult questions together.
Positioning is ultimately an exercise in choice. Every meaningful choice involves a trade-off. You can’t own every benefit, appeal equally to every audience or pursue every opportunity. Workshops provide the space to make those choices consciously, rather than allowing them to emerge by default later in execution. Looking back, it’s rarely the positioning itself that has failed. More often, it’s the shared understanding around it that never fully developed.
Alignment is built in stages
I find it helpful to think about alignment as something that develops progressively throughout a positioning project rather than as a single milestone at the end.
The first stage is alignment around market reality. Do we genuinely share the same understanding of the market, our customers and where the opportunity lies?
The second is alignment around strategic choices. What will we own, and just as importantly, what won’t we own? These decisions create differentiation.
The third is alignment around activation. How will this positioning shape messaging, evidence generation, brand planning and customer engagement? A positioning should become a decision-making lens, not simply a statement on a slide.
What happens when alignment is missing
Consider a positioning centered on protecting long-term renal outcomes. Medical naturally thinks about disease progression and clinical evidence. Commercial sees competitive differentiation. Marketing focuses on patient benefit and communications. None of those interpretations are wrong.
However, unless the team has developed a shared understanding of what the positioning is intended to achieve — and how each function should bring it to life—the strategy begins to drift. Everyone believes they are supporting the same positioning, but they are making different decisions based on different interpretations.
Strong positioning doesn’t remove different perspectives. It gives every function a common strategic lens through which to make decisions.
Putting the work into workshops
The workshops I remember most aren’t those with the neatest templates or the most colorful sticky notes. They’re the ones where assumptions were challenged, difficult conversations were welcomed and teams left with a stronger shared understanding than when they arrived.
That’s why I don’t see workshops as checkpoints at the end of a positioning project. They’re where much of the positioning is actually built. By the time the statement is written, the most important decisions should already have been debated, understood and owned by the people responsible for bringing them to life.
If this resonates, we’re digging into this in more depth in our upcoming podcast series, where we explore the role not only of workshops but also behavior change and the fundamentals of getting your positioning to stick.
And if you want something practical, we’ve also put together a one-page checklist to help teams build positioning that holds up in the real world.