Your competitor is whoever the buyer says it is
Ask a company who they compete with and you get a list of similar businesses. Ask their customers what else they considered and you get a different list. The second list is the one that determines your pricing.
For a great many B2B products the real alternative is a spreadsheet, an existing internal process, or hiring someone. For services it's frequently doing nothing for another quarter. These alternatives set the buyer's reference price, and none of them appear on a competitive matrix built from companies that look like yours.
This matters because every argument you make is heard relative to that reference. A premium price is only premium against something; if the buyer's mental comparison is a junior hire, not another agency, the entire case has to be built against a different number than the one you prepared.
Why adjective positioning does nothing
The standard positioning project produces a new set of descriptors. Faster, more strategic, more senior, more data-led. Every competitor in the category is claiming from the same small pool of adjectives, and buyers know it, which is why the words wash over them.
The reason it changes nothing measurable is structural: the buyer's comparison set is untouched. They still line you up against the same four alternatives and still evaluate you on the same criteria. You have altered how you describe yourself within a frame that someone else set.
The higher-leverage move is changing the frame. If you can shift what a buyer thinks they're choosing between, you change the criteria they judge on. And criteria, unlike adjectives, decide who wins.
The test for whether a choice is real
Category decisions are easy to fake. A company announces it's no longer a generalist agency but a specialist in one vertical, and then continues taking every inquiry that arrives. Nothing has been decided; a sentence has been written.
The test is simple: what would you now say no to? A real positioning choice makes some revenue ineligible. If a repositioning doesn't produce a category of work you would decline, the frame hasn't moved and the exercise was a copy refresh.
That's truly uncomfortable, which is why so few companies follow through. Turning down fitting-but-off-position work in a slow quarter is the moment positioning either becomes real or quietly slips back. And it always slips back silently, without anyone announcing the strategy has been abandoned.
Name what you decline
Write down the kind of work that is now out of scope. If nothing goes on the list, no decision was made.
Check the price follows
A real category shift changes the reference price. If you're charging the same against the same comparison set, you moved words, not position.
Confirm buyers use the language
A category nobody searches for is a private vocabulary. Check whether the words appear in how people actually describe the problem.
Make sure it survives a slow quarter
The strategy is whatever you do when revenue is tight, not what the deck says when it's comfortable.
Inventing a category is usually a mistake
Category creation is fashionable and occasionally correct, but for most companies it's an expensive way to become hard to find. A category that doesn't exist has no search demand, no analyst coverage, no comparison content and no budget line, which means you're funding the education of an entire market by yourself.
Being clearly second-best in a category buyers already search for is almost always a better commercial position than being the undisputed leader of one they have never heard of. Demand you can capture beats demand you have to manufacture, and the manufacturing bill is larger than it looks.
The version that does work is narrower: keep the category buyers recognize, then be specific about the segment within it. Not a new category, but a clear answer to who this is for. That changes the comparison set without requiring anyone to learn a new word.
If your category has no search volume, you aren't positioned. You're hidden. Check demand before committing budget to a name only you use.
What we did with our own
We quote every engagement from a written brief, not a negotiation. That's unusual in this industry, and it's a positioning decision, not a transparency gesture. It removes us from consideration by any buyer whose process depends on haggling a number down, and that's the point. Those engagements were consistently our worst.
It also changes the comparison. A buyer who can see the number is no longer comparing four opaque proposals on relationship and gut feel; they're comparing scope against a published figure. That's a frame we're more likely to win in, and we chose it deliberately.
The cost is real. We lose inquiries that would have converted after a negotiation, and we hear about it. That's what makes it a position, not a preference. It rules something out, consistently, including in the quarters when we'd rather it did not.
Weighing the decision?
Terms used in this piece
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