What I’ve learned from leading 100+ B2B tech brand positioning projects.

I’ve now worked on around 100 B2B tech positioning projects.

Different markets. Different stages of growth. Different products. Different levels of complexity.

But the same problems come up again and again. Most companies think they have a positioning problem because they haven’t found the right words yet. Usually, that isn’t the problem. The problem is that they haven’t made enough choices.

That distinction matters, because positioning is not copywriting or brand messaging. It is deciding what you want to mean in the mind of the market – and then being disciplined enough to keep meaning it. Finding the ownable thing and then doubling down. Not enough people double down. And only a few brands are able to find their ownable thing.

Most positioning is too broad to be useful

Almost every positioning project starts with a long list of things the company wants to be known for.

Innovative. Trusted. Customer-centric. Intelligent. Flexible. Enterprise-grade. Easy to work with.

All perfectly reasonable things to want. But I think they’re all bullsh*t because unfortunately, they are also the things almost every competitor wants to be known for. If your positioning could comfortably sit on five competitor homepages, it is probably not positioning. It is category wallpaper.

Strong positioning needs edges and boundaries. It tells people what you are, but it also tells them what you are not. That is why one of the most useful questions in a positioning process is:

What are we prepared not to be?

That question tends to make people uncomfortable. Which is usually a sign that you are getting somewhere. I always ask it in marketing discovery sessions and watch the client squirm.

Strategy starts where choice starts.

“Better” is rarely a very interesting position

A surprisingly large amount of B2B positioning ultimately reduces to: “We do what everyone else does, but better.”

Better service. Better technology. Better data. Better integrations. Better people.

Even if all of that is true, there is a problem. Everybody else is saying it too. And ‘better’ is not a particularly useful memory structure. It requires the buyer to compare you carefully, understand the evidence and conclude that you are superior.

Most buyers do not behave like that. They use mental shortcuts. 80% of B2B buyers buy from brands they already knew at their category entry point. They shortlist brands that come to mind easily. They simplify complexity. One of the most useful questions I have found is:

Why should someone choose us without us claiming to be better than everyone else?

That tends to force a much more interesting answer. Maybe you have a different worldview. Maybe you make a different trade-off. Maybe you solve the problem in a fundamentally different way. Maybe you are built for a particular kind of buyer that the rest of the category underserves.

That gives the market something it can actually mentally attach to you.

A good position should have a sensible opposite

There is another test I use a lot which I stole from my marketing hero Rory Sutherland; “The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Possibly a better idea.”

Take the proposed positioning and reverse it. Would the opposite ever make sense as a business strategy? If not, you probably have a truism rather than a position. “Put customers first” fails the test because nobody is choosing to put customers last. “Drive better outcomes” fails for the same reason. But “specialist rather than broad” works. “Premium rather than accessible” works. “Human judgement rather than automation” works. “Speed rather than customisation” works.

The opposite does not have to be stupid. In fact, it should ideally be a perfectly credible strategy for somebody else. That is what makes your choice meaningful.

Customers care much less about your category than you do

Tech companies spend an extraordinary amount of time talking to themselves. They debate architectures, methodologies, features, workflows, integrations and category definitions. Sometimes they even invent new subcategories and then spend three years trying to explain them.

I have had multiple occasions where a client has insisted on positioning themselves in a new category or sub-category. I have come up with an adjacent category that anchors them closely to a category buyers recognise, but with a difference. A bit like the 80:20 familiarity/innovation rule. Buyers want something they understand but with an edge or a twist.

In fact, the customer is almost always thinking much simpler.

Will this solve the problem? Will it make my life easier? Will I regret buying it? Will I look smart in front of my colleagues for choosing it?

This is one of the hardest things for technically sophisticated businesses to accept. Clarity is not the same as dumbing something down. The best B2B Tech positioning takes the complexity inside the business and translates it into something meaningful outside it.

Features are important. But they are a fragile place to build a brand.

Features matter enormously when somebody is evaluating the product. But they are often a weak foundation for positioning. They are important for differentiation and specification checks at the decision stage, but not as important when you’re trying to position your brand in their mind.

Features change over time or competitors copy them. AI has accelerated that process even further.

The thing that looks genuinely differentiated today can become a category expectation remarkably quickly. That is why the stronger positions normally sit one level above the feature set. They connect what the company does to why it matters, and then ideally to a broader belief about how the category should work. That gives the brand somewhere to go and something to own.

You are no longer trying to permanently own a feature. You are trying to own an idea.

The best positioning creates some tension

This is probably one of the biggest lessons from doing these projects repeatedly. If everybody in the room immediately loves the positioning, I get suspicious. Strong positioning normally creates a bit of tension.

Someone usually says something like “Can we really say that or will that neglect X audience segment?”

Yes. The answer is almost always yes. It comes back to the choice point I made at the start of the blog. You can’t be everything to everybody – you need to sacrifice and neglect and double down. Playing it safe makes you generic and that’s a sure-fire way to be ignorable and forgettable.

B2B Tech positioning is not an exercise in creating a description of the company that everybody can agree with. It is about deciding what gets the emphasis. And the moment you emphasise something, you probably de-emphasise something else. That is the trade-off. A positioning strategy designed to exclude absolutely nobody normally ends up meaning very little to everybody.

Differentiation and distinctiveness are different jobs

This is another distinction that gets muddled constantly. Differentiation gives someone a reason to choose you. Distinctiveness helps them recognise and remember who you are in the first place. You need both but at different times. A brand can have an incredibly differentiated proposition and still be completely forgettable. Equally, a brand can be distinctive and memorable while giving buyers very little reason to choose it.

The strongest brands combine the two. They have a clear reason to buy, and a recognisable way of showing up. My favourite examples are those brands that make their differentiation a point of distinctiveness and double down on it – like Tony’s Chocolonely.

Research from System1 and Effie has found that richer distinctive assets such as fluent devices, sonic devices, jingles and distinctive product shapes can be substantially more effective at creating brand fluency than relying on the logo alone. That is why positioning cannot stop at the positioning statement and a messaging framework – you have to turn the big idea into memory structures through multiple mediums.

Positioning has to survive contact with marketing

I increasingly think this is the most useful test of a positioning strategy.

Does it make the next 100 marketing decisions easier?

Does it tell you what you should talk about? What you should stop talking about?

Which product messages reinforce the position and which dilute it? Which partnerships make sense? What should your sales team emphasise?

A positioning that sounds brilliant in a workshop but cannot answer those questions is not doing enough work. A good position becomes an operating system. It literally becomes your business. If it lives only on slide 47 of a brand deck, the project has failed.

The strongest B2B brands normally have a point of view

A category description is not a position. Neither is a product description. The brands that become interesting tend to believe something. They reject an established convention. They reject an existing belief of the market. They understand a customer tension in a different way. That point of view gives the brand energy. This also makes your marketing much easier. Because suddenly there is something to write about and something to campaign about.

Most importantly, there is something for the market to remember.

You cannot ask someone to remember ten things

This sounds obvious, but it is one of the most common problems I see.

I remember listening to advertising legend Dave Trott on a podcast and he used this genius analogy-

“If I threw ten tennis balls at you in quick succession, how many could you catch?”

Companies want to be known for innovation, service, expertise, flexibility, integration, ease of use, intelligence, trust, value and category leadership. All at once. The internal logic is understandable because all those things might genuinely be true but customers do not store company presentations in their heads. Memory is selective.

And in crowded B2B categories, the problem is even more acute because the majority of your potential market is not actively shopping at any particular moment. Research from The B2B Institute shows that less than 5% of your market is in-market to buy today. Which means your marketing needs to create memories that will only become commercially useful months, sometimes years, later.

That changes the question. Now you ask yourself:

What is the thing we want to be remembered for that our target segment of the market actually cares about?

That is much harder. But it is also a question that really matters.

Positioning only starts working when you repeat it

This is where a lot of businesses sabotage otherwise good positioning. They do the hard strategic work to find an idea, and then they build a campaign, but then six months later they get bored because someone wants a refresh or the new CMO wants to put their stamp on things and the brand looks and sounds completely different again.

Internally, this feels like progress because it feels new, progressive and fresh but externally, you may just be paying to introduce yourself all over again. The evidence on creative consistency is increasingly difficult to ignore. System1 and Effie research has found that the most creatively consistent brands generate far more very large brand effects than the least consistent ones. Consistency does not mean making the same advert forever but it means building on the same memory structures and strategic idea.

Think “Should’ve gone to Specsavers.” Same big idea – lots of executions.

Ultimately, positioning is not a word-based messaging problem. It is a memory problem with scary choices. You have to decide what you want the market to remember. Then make that idea distinctive enough, interesting enough and consistent enough that people actually do.

Be interesting enough to be noticed. Be distinctive enough to be remembered. Be differentiated enough to be chosen.

After leading over 100 positioning projects for B2B Tech brands, that is probably the most distilled version I have.