How to check whether your company agrees on its own positioning
Five questions, thirty seconds each, sent to everyone. If the answers disagree, marketing will amplify the disagreement rather than fix it.
- Send five questions to every employee and give them thirty to forty five seconds each. You want the answer already in their head, not the one they can find on the website.
- Compare the answers. Where the company agrees, where it tells different stories, and where people cannot explain the company at all.
- Every campaign, landing page, sales deck and film is downstream of that story. If the company is confused, execution amplifies the confusion.
- A bad result is not a marketing problem to solve with better marketing. It is a positioning problem, and it is cheaper to find now than after a launch.
Before you brief an agency, run this on your own company. It takes an afternoon and it tells you whether you have a positioning problem or an execution problem, which are not the same thing and do not have the same fix.
What are the five questions?
Five, in this order, sent to every employee:
- What is our product?
- Who is our ideal customer?
- What is the main use case of our product?
- Who or what are we primarily competing with?
- What makes our product uniquely valuable?
No preamble, no company context, no links. If you explain the exercise at length you will get the answer people think you want.
Why the thirty second limit?
Because you want what is already in their head, not what they can research. Give someone five minutes and they will open the website, find the positioning statement and return it to you. That tells you the statement exists. It does not tell you anyone believes it, uses it, or could produce it in front of a customer.
Thirty to forty five seconds is roughly the time an employee has when a friend asks what the company does at a dinner. That is the version that actually reaches the market, repeated across every conversation your people have.
Who should get it?
Everyone. Engineering, sales, support, finance, the two people who joined last month.
The instinct is to send it to marketing and the leadership team, and that is the version that tells you nothing, because those are the people who wrote the words. The interesting gap is usually between the people who authored the positioning and the people who have to carry it. In a deep tech company the second group includes engineers who talk to customers' engineers, which is where a great deal of your credibility is actually built or lost.
How do you read the results?
Sort the answers into three piles, per question.
Aligned. Different words, same substance. This is the goal and it is rarer than founders expect.
Divergent. Two or more coherent but incompatible stories. This is the most dangerous result, because everyone is confident and nobody is wrong internally. It usually shows up first on question two, the ideal customer, and question four, the competition.
Blank or hedged. People who cannot answer, or who answer with a list. A list is a tell: "we work with X, and also Y, and enterprise too" means nobody has decided.
Read question four especially closely. Who you believe you compete with determines what you are compared against, what you are priced against, and which objections you have to answer. If half the company names an incumbent and half names doing nothing, you have two different sales motions running under one brand.
What does a bad result actually mean?
That your positioning is unresolved, not that your marketing is underperforming. Those failures look identical from the outside and have opposite fixes.
Marketing amplifies whatever story it is given. Given a sharp one, campaigns compound: every asset reinforces the same claim and a reader who meets you three times meets the same company. Given a confused one, spend makes the confusion louder and more expensive, and you conclude that the channel did not work.
This is why the sequence matters more than the budget. Every campaign, landing page, sales deck, advertisement, event and piece of content is downstream of the core narrative. Better execution of the wrong story is still the wrong story, produced faster.
What if the answers disagree but everyone is confident?
That is the normal result for a company between roughly ten and eighty people, and it is not a failure of the people answering.
It usually means the positioning was set when the company was smaller and has not been revisited since the product or the buyer moved. Or it was written down once, in a deck, and never converted into language people could use in their own words. A positioning statement that only exists in a slide is not a shared story; it is a document.
The fix is a decision, not a workshop about values. Somebody has to choose which customer, which competitor and which claim, and then the language has to be rebuilt so that an engineer, a salesperson and a founder can each say it in their own register without contradicting each other.
What do you do with the result?
If the answers are aligned, you have a marketing problem and you should go and solve it. Brief the agency, buy the campaign, build the site. This exercise has just told you that execution is the constraint.
If they diverge, resolve the positioning before you commission anything downstream. That is the work our deep tech positioning page describes, and it is deliberately the cheapest thing we sell: a paid discovery is one workshop with founders, engineering and go-to-market, a findings brief and a locked scope, so that nobody buys a brand system before anyone knows what it has to do.
We run a version of this survey inside that workshop. It is more useful when the answers arrive before the room does, because people revise in front of each other.
When is this not worth running?
If you are three people who talk all day, skip it. You already know whether you agree, and you will learn more from ten customer calls.
If you have already decided to rebrand for reasons that have nothing to do with clarity, such as a merger or a name conflict, this will not change the decision. Run it afterwards to check the new story landed.
And if you suspect the real problem is the product rather than the story, this will not tell you. A company can be perfectly aligned around a proposition the market does not want. That is a different and more expensive diagnosis, and no amount of positioning work substitutes for it.
FAQ
How many people do I need for this to be useful?
Ten is enough to see divergence. Below that, talk to them individually instead. Above about fifty, the pattern is usually clear in the first thirty responses.
Should the answers be anonymous?
Yes, and say so. Named answers pull towards the official version, which is exactly the version you are trying to see past.
What if people just copy the website?
Then the time limit was too long, or the survey explained too much. Cut the preamble and cut the time. You are not testing whether the words exist, you are testing whether they are in use.
Do you run this as part of an engagement?
Yes, inside the discovery workshop, and we prefer the responses to arrive before the session rather than during it. Nine to sixteen weeks from kickoff to a finished brand system, fixed scope and one price, quoted after a thirty-minute call.
We are pre-launch and have no customers. Is it still worth doing?
More so. Pre-launch is when divergence is cheapest to fix, because nothing has been printed, built or indexed yet.
Written by Mejo Kuriachan. More in the blog, the glossary and the FAQ.