The category you compete in is a choice

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 — and 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 is 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 rather than another agency, the entire case has to be built against a different number than the one you prepared.

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 are choosing between, you change the criteria they evaluate on — and criteria, unlike adjectives, determine who wins.

Category decisions are easy to fake. A company announces it is no longer a generalist agency but a specialist in one vertical, and then continues taking every enquiry 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 does not produce a category of work you would decline, the frame has not moved and the exercise was a copy refresh.

That is genuinely 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 reverts — and it always reverts silently, without anyone announcing the strategy has been abandoned.

Category creation is fashionable and occasionally correct, but for most companies it is an expensive way to become hard to find. A category that does not exist has no search demand, no analyst coverage, no comparison content and no budget line, which means you are 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 recognise, then be specific about the segment within it. Not a new category, but an unambiguous answer to who this is for — which changes the comparison set without requiring anyone to learn a new word.

We quote every engagement from a written brief rather than a negotiation, which is unusual in this industry and is a positioning decision rather than a transparency gesture. It removes us from consideration by any buyer whose process depends on haggling a number down, and that is 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 are comparing scope against a published figure. That is a frame we are more likely to win in, and we chose it deliberately.

The cost is real. We lose enquiries that would have converted after a negotiation, and we hear about it. That is what makes it a position rather than a preference — it forecloses something, consistently, including in the quarters when we would rather it did not.