Sun Tzu figured out your positioning problem in 500 BC
Brought to you by The Art Of Positioning Podcast
“Dad, Dad, I want to do those, it’d be so much fun!”
I pointed at the TV as the ads were playing.
I’m sure he thought I was an odd creature.
But I loved the idea that you could take two things that had no business being in the same sentence and make something that made one of them unforgettable.
I've been thinking about that a lot today, another year older, and another year potentially more unhinged - or perhaps closer to what child me was like.
And the older I get, the more I see it…everything connects.
The things that last, the ideas that survive, the businesses that stand out without screaming for attention, they all figured that out.
Which is probably why a book written in fifth century BC China is still on shelves, still being read, still being argued about. I see it because Sun Tzu wasn't really writing about war.
He was writing about what it takes to win before the fight starts. 👇
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Your website gives off a feeling. Your brand has a story. But are they actually saying the same thing?
In this Art of Positioning episode, we go at it from three angles: visuals, words, and strategy, with UX designer Rachel Lee 😽 and verbal identity specialist Emily McGregor.
The client stories. The gaps they've seen. And the tests you can run right now to find out if your brand is actually distinct or just looks that way from the inside.
Listen to the full The Art of Positioning Podcast episode here.
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Every battle is won before it's fought
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 4, Tactical Dispositions.
Most established businesses already have proof of what works.
Good clients, results, a track record worth something.
And yet the positioning, the thing that should be doing the filtering, pulling in the right people and letting the wrong ones walk, gets built reactively:
Something lands well, so it gets repeated.
A client describes the work in a way that resonates, so it ends up on the website.
The strategy becomes a collage of whatever stuck.
Sun Tzu's argument is that the work happens before any of that.
The intelligence-gathering, the honest assessment of terrain, that is the strategy.
For a business, that terrain is three things:
your competition,
your market,
and the broader landscape they sit inside.
Know the enemy. Know yourself. Don't obsess over either.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 3, Attack by Stratagem.
The majority of my conversations have this commonality: businesses that know themselves reasonably well, they know what they do, they know they're good at it, but they have spent almost no time understanding the competitive landscape they're operating in.
So they place themselves (and I’m saying this in the loosest possible way) based on what feels true about them internally, without ever checking whether that same thing is being said by four other firms on the same Google results page.
And then there are the ones who go the other direction.
Meaning they went so deep in competitor research that they've started unconsciously mirroring what everyone else says:
Adjusting their messaging based on what the competition is doing, chasing the same language, the same positioning angles, the same client promises.
At that point, the intelligence-gathering became the problem.
Sun Tzu's point isn't to obsess over both.
It's to have enough clarity on each that you stop being reactive.
Know your competitors well enough that you can stop thinking about them, because you've found the angle they're not covering.
The businesses that keep trying to fight head-on
"Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 3, Attack by Stratagem.
Businesses that kick-ass aren’t fighting loudest (add in here the “we’re better” way of thinking).
They’re consistently found on the ground that others aren’t on.
This is where you've looked at the landscape, you've found the gap, and you approach from the angle that's least expected but most logical given everything you know.
That's guerrilla positioning.
Low resistance, high precision.
You're arriving somewhere the noise hasn't reached yet.
What I keep seeing instead is businesses preparing for a grand relaunch, or ‘rebrand’ blurgh.
Months, sometimes years, of building before they show the world anything new.
The intention is usually to create the kind of drama that gets people talking, like Ferrari's recent reveal of the most off brand concept ever (but that’s a thought for elsewhere), the Jaguar rebrand (we went into that one in why your customers can't explain what you do).
But there's a cost to that approach.
You've spent all that time without LIVE testing, without the market telling you anything, without the ability to adapt.
By the time you reveal, the terrain may have shifted entirely.
And if the positioning underneath the rebrand was never sharp to begin with, you get a loud entrance, vague message, and the same ceiling.
You’ve lost trust.
Market share.
Loyalty.
And essentially have to start from scratch for all of that. When the rebrand doesn't change who enquires covers exactly this.
Sun Tzu was obsessed with reading conditions in real time and moving accordingly.
That only works if you're nimble enough to see where the weakness is, and you can't do that if you've been heads-down building for 18 months with no feedback (regardless of where you’re at in business).
The media brand concept
I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with someone who wanted to build a media operation to promote their business.
The idea was to create a content domain, think Bloomberg, Diary of a CEO, that kind of territory, where the audience builds through media consumption, and the people "in the know" eventually reach out for the high-ticket work.
And there are businesses that´ve been built that way.
But without the work we've been talking about you're entering one of the most saturated, highest-output, fastest-moving spaces in existence without a specific enough reason for anyone to choose yours over the 50 others already doing it.
The first thing out of the conversation was "I want to build something like Bloomberg."
And I know I’ve said this before, but I’m not gonna quit, but that sentence, "I want to be like [x]", is the fastest way to blend in.
Bloomberg is Bloomberg because of a very specific positioning decision made early, held consistently, and built around a clearly defined audience with a clearly defined intelligence need.
Copy the format without the specificity underneath it, and you've just added to the noise. Faster, under more pressure, with higher content demands and no positioning advantage to fall back on. (AI just gave your fuzzy brand a megaphone is a relevant issue here, same principle, different channel.)
Sun Tzu would call this going to war without knowing the terrain. You’re fighting, but without decideding on the where, why, or for whom.
What happens if you keep going without doing this work?
You build. You put out content. You get referrals. You take calls.
And everything feels like it's moving because it technically is.
But the calls keep starting slightly off.
The inquiries come in slightly wrong.
The market placement that's supposed to filter in the right people and filter out the wrong ones isn't doing either.
And at some point, the ceiling becomes impossible to ignore, even though nothing is obviously broken. (The revenue ceiling no marketing can break through is where this ends up.)
So, let's fix it👇
🏏 Badass Tip
Sun Tzu called it foreknowledge: intelligence gathered from the real world, not guesswork, not assumption.
This is the business version.
Open a tab.
Pull up the 5 competitors you most regularly lose work to, or get compared to.
Read how they describe what they do (not their about page), think the headline, the first two sentences, whatever they lead with.
Write down every word or phrase that shows up more than twice across those 5. That's contested ground. (You're fighting in the same trench as everyone else when one of those words appears on your own site or in your pitch.)
Now find the thing none of them say. (The angle nobody's standing on.)
Cross-reference it against your last 5 clients who signed (like, what actually brought them in, in their words)
If that gap matches what converted your best clients, you've found your ground.
If it doesn't match, your market placement and your reality are two different things, and everything you put out is working against you.
What we’re doing here is essentially an intel brief.
And it'll tell you more than any rebrand brief ever would.
🦘 B
Often, I see businesses hit a growth wall when their offers and brands don't complement or build on each other (to the point they end up unintentionally cannibalizing each other), so I put together two decades of knowledge from serving brands across various industries and built a tool intended to find the best solution for your brand mix and business goals.
It's a honed-in set of questions where you get direction right up front (best use of 10 minutes): Align your offers and brands today.
