Positioning is a subtraction problem

What you are really working out is everything you are not.

Most positioning sessions I have sat through start by adding. Here is a whiteboard. What are we? Smart. Fast. AI powered. Enterprise grade. Trusted. Global. Innovative. By the time the markers run out the board says nothing, because it says everything. Someone takes a photo and the photo is never opened again.

Positioning is the opposite move. It is what you cross off the list.

The exercise I keep coming back to is simple, slow, and gives you ugly output. Write down every adjective you would honestly use about your product. Write it long. Do not edit. Then write down the three closest competitors. Not your fantasy competitors. Not Excel. The three companies that actually show up on a buyer's shortlist with you. Now, for each adjective on your list, ask a single question: would any of those three claim this word, too? If yes, cross it out.

What is left is your real position. Usually it is one or two words. Often the team is disappointed. "We are not going to put that on a billboard." Good. If the remaining word makes the team a little sad, it is probably the true one.

The exercise works because it forces the distinction to come from the market, not from the room. You can tell yourself you are "innovative" all day. So can everyone else. Subtraction takes out the words that are really about how the team wants to feel, and leaves the ones that are about how the product actually behaves.

The hardest part, in practice, is naming the competitors honestly. Teams like to pretend they compete with no one ("we are a category of one") or with everyone ("we compete with spreadsheets"). Neither is true. There are three to five companies a buyer is looking at next to you. Those are the ones on the whiteboard, with their adjective columns next to yours.

A worked example. A law firm I helped at Story Jar had eighteen different service lines: corporate, tax, IP, family, immigration, real estate, every flavor. Every page on their site opened with the same three words: trusted, experienced, responsive. So did every law firm's site on the first page of Google. Literally the same three adjectives. We did the subtraction. Everything the nearby firms could also say, we crossed out. What we were left with was not glamorous. It was the one thing none of the other firms were doing: they had published, on a fixed fee, a small menu of packaged legal products. Five figures. Here is what you get. Here is when.

Ugly. Not what a managing partner wants to say out loud. But the only thing, in that market, that was actually theirs. The homepage was rebuilt around those four packaged products. The rest of the service lines went to sub-pages. Six months later their inbound was up, and for the first time the conversations coming in were from people who already knew what they wanted to buy.

A second one, different industry. A heritage retailer I helped at Fausto Salazar had an adjective column stuffed with words the whole category used: trusted, family owned, local, curated, friendly. Every nearby competitor could say the same. What only they could say was that they had sold the same household categories, continuously, since before most of their customers' grandparents were born. Awkward to put on a billboard. But a real boundary, and a useful one for the way the site, the email program, and the physical store started to speak.

The same logic applies in deep tech. I ran this exercise with the marketing team at Outsight against our closest competitors, and the word that survived was unglamorous, technical, and only ours. Same shape of finding, different vertical. Subtraction is industry agnostic.

A few follow on notes.

Subtraction does not tell you how to talk about the remaining word. It tells you what is yours. Turning a technical sounding remainder into a sentence a buyer will actually nod at is a separate job. It usually goes better when someone who was not in the room the whole time helps you write it.

Subtraction also does not tell you the remaining word is valuable. It only tells you it is yours. Sometimes you finish and the one word left is something the market does not care about. That is an even more useful finding. It means you are not different where you thought you were, and the next step is product, not marketing.

Positioning by subtraction is slower than positioning by brainstorm. It gives you smaller, uglier outputs. But those outputs survive contact with the buyer, because they have already survived contact with the competition. And that is the only test that counts.