Ask a marketing team to fix their positioning and watch what happens. Someone opens a doc and starts workshopping taglines. Someone else pulls up the homepage headline. An hour later you’ve got twelve new versions of one sentence, and the actual problem — the thing that made the positioning feel off in the first place — hasn’t moved an inch. It’s just wearing nicer clothes now.
This happens because most teams think positioning is a wording problem. It isn’t. Positioning is the strategic context your product lives in. Messaging is the words you use to communicate that context. Related, but not the same job — and April Dunford’s work is the clearest explanation I’ve found of why conflating them quietly wrecks a lot of go-to-market plans.
What positioning actually is
Positioning answers questions that have nothing to do with word choice. Compared to what alternatives are buyers actually choosing between when they consider us — including doing nothing at all? What do we have that those alternatives don’t? Why does that matter to anyone? Who cares about it the most? And given all of that, what category do we actually belong in, inside the buyer’s head, not ours?
None of that requires a clever sentence. It requires real decisions — decisions that can be wrong, decisions that shift as a market matures, decisions a founder or product team sometimes made by accident three years ago and nobody’s revisited since, possibly on purpose.
Messaging comes after. Once you know the real competitive alternative, the real differentiator, and who actually cares, messaging is just the job of saying that clearly and well. Important job. Still downstream.
Why skipping straight to messaging is so tempting
Messaging feels fixable in an afternoon. Brainstorm headlines, argue about a tagline, run an internal poll on which version people like better. Visible output, fast. Feels like progress.
Fixing positioning is slower and less satisfying, because the first honest step is usually admitting you don’t actually know who you’re competing against in the buyer’s mind, or why they’d pick you, or whether the category you’ve assumed you’re in is even the one buyers put you in. Uncomfortable. Wordsmithing a tagline is not.
I’ve watched teams cycle through the same pattern — messaging refresh, mild lift, fades in two quarters, repeat, forever — because every round treated a positioning problem as a copywriting problem. The words got better. The underlying confusion about what the company actually is, and to whom, never got resolved. The words could only carry it so far, like putting a nicer bumper on a car with no engine.
The tell that you have a positioning problem, not a messaging problem
Here’s the diagnostic I use. If your team can’t agree, in one sentence, on the specific alternative a buyer would choose instead of you — not “the whole market,” a specific real alternative — that’s positioning. If sales reps each describe the product differently, none of the versions technically wrong, just inconsistent, that’s positioning too. If your best customers describe you completely differently than your own website describes you, also positioning.
Messaging problems look different. The underlying story is solid and consistent, but the actual words are clunky, generic, or buried under jargon nobody outside the building understands. Much smaller, much more fixable problem — and the one people default to because it’s the one they know how to fix by Friday.
What actually changes when you get this right
Once positioning is settled — the real alternative, the real differentiator, the real audience who cares most — messaging becomes almost easy. You’re not inventing a clever way to say something vague. You’re saying something true and specific as clearly as possible, which is a far more solvable creative problem than the one everyone thinks they’re solving.
The deals I’ve seen lost to positioning confusion rarely look like a positioning problem from the outside. They look like “the messaging isn’t landing,” or “the sales team keeps going off script,” or “our win rate against Competitor X is oddly low.” All three are usually the same root issue in a different costume, and no amount of tagline workshopping was ever going to fix it.