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Chief Positioning Officer
"Hey, whose in charge here?"

You can spot startups that are struggling to grow and have little future prospect in doing so by a common trait: there’s no clear stakeholder who owns Positioning. And, if there is, it’s the wrong person.
When I say “Positioning” I am not merely referring to knocking out a positioning statement and defining the four ‘classic elements’ of 1) Target Audience 2) Category 3) Differentiation and 4) Benefit. This is 20th century business school bullshit (and it’s not Positioning).
Positioning is a business strategy. The business strategy that matters for success.
If it’s not working and there’s no direction to figure it out, no other strategy or tactic matters. Everything will be neutered. It’s like building a company in ‘nightmare’ difficulty-level mode.
It’s the priority to test and validate, above all else. Otherwise, risk is being increased exponentially by leaving it to chance.
Positioning is commonly thought of as a marketing concept — because the theory behind it grew out of the advertising industry — but, that’s a very one-dimensional interpretation of it. And, not reflective of the thinking behind it.
Positioning isn’t just something marketing ‘does’. Well, it shouldn’t be. Otherwise, you have delegated the most important company job to a department or person that doesn’t have the ability to deliver.
How so?
In order to be successful as a company (you know… sell stuff and make money), customers have to buy from you.
In order for customers to buy stuff from you, they have to perceive that your proposition is valuable and meets their prioritised needs in a way that your competitive alternatives do not.
In order for customers to have that perception, you need to be positioned in their minds in a manner that instils buying behaviour.
Do you see the point I am alluding to?
There is no objective reality. There is only subjective reality.
You are not building a startup in a world outside the mind — a world of indisputable facts, universal truths, and logical laws.
You are building a startup within the shared cognition of your best-fit prospects. A perceived-reality.
Once you acknowledge this, the key objective is to position yourself into that perceived-reality. To think-through, learn, and figure out how to insert yourself into that mental value chain.
This means your Positioning strategy must dictate everything you do, so that you can claim your own position.
And, I mean everything — mission and vision, value proposition design, hiring, culture, product, tech, sales, ops, marketing, customer success, etc.
Why?
Your Positioning represents the unique value to which prospects perceive you in their minds. It creates ‘buy in this context’ behaviour.
Every business component should work together in a concentrated force to support building a favourable position.
Given the significance of that, there’s a clear need for someone to own the Positioning role in a startup. To be the ‘Chief Positioning Officer’.
Who should that be, though?
The CEO.
The CEO’s single-most important objective is to build and grow the strength of the position that their startup owns in the minds of prospects.
When all is said and done, the relative strength of this position is what all the pain-staking effort and hard work amounts too — the grand total of all product sprints, sales calls, R&D, hiring, marketing campaigns, integrations, coding, operational execution, meetings, regulatory approvals etc.
The CEO is not building a startup. The CEO is building a position in the mind.
The outcome of this position in the mind is revenue.
Why does the Chief Positioning Officer have to be the CEO?
Positioning is a company-wide focus and strategy.
Whoever performs the Chief Positioning Officer role needs to be able to align the whole company to execute against the strategy, driving it throughout the organisation.
Only the CEO has the clout, vision, and view to do this effectively (or, at the earlier stages of a startup’s journey, a founding team on the same wavelength).
Only the CEO can communicate the strategy and hold everyone accountable.
If this isn't done each department, each person, is going to be developing the company in a different direction — a different position.
What about product-market fit?
Strong Positioning delivers “product-market fit”.
"Product-market fit” is a position in the mind which is perceived to be radically differentiated and valuable relative to the closest competing position in the mind (competitive alternatives).
Except, a Chief Positioning Officer does not believe in “product-market fit”. This implies an objective reality.
Instead, they believe in proposition-mind fit. This means being really clear about who they are targeting and how they are getting into their minds. More specifically, discovering the insight on how to achieve this.
What the Chief Positioning Officer must do
The Chief Positioning Officer has 3 key roles:
To define the Positioning strategy. This is defined with input from others, but not by committee. It is refined over time.
To communicate the Positioning strategy to the team. To clearly and consistently highlight a specific destination and ongoing refinements. This guides what each team member should mobilise towards.
To provide the means to execute against the Positioning strategy. This takes many forms and is context dependent. A northstar metric which mirrors the Positioning strategy is a key example.
Example: Outbrain
I recently wrote about Outbrain, a B2B adtech company that created a new category.
As CEO, here’s what Yaron Galai did as Chief Positioning Officer:
Positioning strategy. Defined the theory to create the ‘sponsored content recommendations’ category. This radically differentiated Outbrain from competitive alternatives. Principally, by developing the proposition of native ads (versus the banner ads that folks were used to).
Communicate specific direction. In order to build the ‘sponsored content recommendations’ category, the Outbrain team were guided towards the same ongoing destination: to “surface the most interesting link to the reader”. This supported the position Outbrain wanted to build in the minds of prospects.
Means to execute. Though it has not been publicly disclosed, an actionable northstar metric could’ve been “click-through rate per user”. This would measure the effectiveness of “surfacing the most interesting link to the reader” and make it actionable.
After Outbrain created the category, many ‘me too’ competitors popped up. Additionally, the mental landscape of adjacent categories to ‘sponsored content recommendations’ changed dramatically. This required continual refinement of Outbrain’s Positioning as it scaled.
To get the full case study and context, go here.
Example: NeXT
I generally like to refrain from using Steve Jobs as an example, since he’s used so exhaustively in business analysis and he’s like a ‘1 in 10 billion’ type person.
However, today I’m going to make an exception. Partly because it’s not Apple-related. And, partly because it’s such a good example.
The below video is an "inside look" into the pathway that Steve Jobs took in defining the Positioning strategy of NeXT and communicating it internally to the team.
How he articulates the journey and strategic logic is brilliantly clear.
Internal NeXT video (1991):
In future newsletters, I will:
Provide an actionable breakdown of this NeXT video
Discuss how different CEOs approach the role of the Chief Positioning Officer differently (and win)
Discuss how the Chief Positioning Officer role changes from pre-product-market fit to post-product market fit.
That’s it for today. I’ll be back in your inbox soon. 🤘
Martin
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