I'm Luke Stevens, founder of Positioning Science, author, and positioning consultant
Quick facts:
The legendary (and oft-quoted) Charlie Munger, former vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, once said:
Take a simple idea and take it seriously.
The simple idea I’ve decided to take seriously is this:
You need to be about something.
You need to be about something so people think of you, investigate you, and eventually choose you over alternatives. Sounds obvious, right? But obvious doesn’t mean easy. What’s easy is being about a lot of things — everything and nothing. Zeroing in on that particular something is a different game.
That was true for me, too.
Eventually — as you’ll read — I landed on an approach grounded in modern neuroscience, an approach that can be boiled down to four actions: prove it, find it, own it, or ride it.
My story falls very much under “find it.”
I eventually found a concept I could own and a position I can build and hopefully ride to becoming an influential voice on positioning, but first I had to find it through brutal iteration. We’re all just iterating until we find something that clicks; some folks are just lucky enough to find that something sooner rather than later.
For me, it felt like it took f o r e v e r to come up with the concept that I could be about: science-based positioning.
But I did it. And if I can do it, you can too. It’s not always that hard — it was hard for me because I had to do the years of work to figure out what mattered in the first place, get some distance from it, then capture it as a concept.
You’ve probably already put in those months or years of work, and perhaps there’s been plenty of brutal iteration throughout, and now it’s time to put your finger on exactly what you’re about — what position you want to take.
That’s been true for the clients I’ve worked with — I always knew a project was going well when we landed on a clear concept for them to be about; a clear position for them to build in the mind of the buyer.
And eventually I learned that there’s science we can draw from that makes this much easier, even if it’s not easy.
There’s both a science and an art to this work, as I had to learn that the hard way. Years ago, I naively wandered into the messaging world with zero appreciation for why positioning — and the resulting clarity in messaging — is such a challenge. I just thought marketers sucked at writing. (Which, let’s be real, is often true!)
Why are SaaS homepages so bad?
In the 2010s, I studied landing pages and wondered why so many SaaS companies and startups had such vague messaging on their homepages. (This was before everyone slapped “AI” on their homepage — problem solved!)
This wasn’t a unique insight on my part — many folks felt the same way, and the whole B2B SaaS conversion copywriting industry was born. And I jumped right in!
Being a B2B conversion copywriter was great — I loved tech, messaging work fit me like a glove, and I really enjoyed the research-driven process of understanding why people did or didn’t buy.
But there was an itch I couldn’t scratch.
How do you win?
Copywriting, when it comes to landing pages, is fundamentally about being able to ‘speak business’ and write tight value props. That is, in and of itself, an act of positioning. Folks want to occupy a ‘serious business you should trust and buy from’ position in the buyer’s mind and want their messaging to reflect that.
That’s great, but that’s merely getting on the playing field; it’s not how you win.
And I wanted to help folks win.
Is this having an impact?
Helping folks win means being as ruthlessly objective as possible about whether you’re having an impact. The results of copywriting alone seemed pretty mixed to me. Even with all the customer research and wordsmithing that goes into modern copywriting and messaging, there was, for me at least, still something missing.
This really bugged me, especially as impact itself is something that’s fascinated me for a long time. Especially impact you could measure.
In the ’00s, I cut my teeth on the web — building stuff is fun! — and in the early 2010s, I became obsessed with data — web analytics, A/B testing, and SEO analysis. I wanted to have an impact. I wanted to help others have an impact. I believed the data-driven approach was the way to do that. I tried to write books about it. I tried (and failed) to bootstrap a web analytics startup around it. I really believed in data. And sometimes, the data-driven approach worked! (And still does!) But often, it seemed to only succeed in a very narrow way.
Don’t get me wrong, quantitative data is great if you’ve got it. But in the B2B world, you often don’t. So how do you have an impact? How do you win?
Positioning choices
Everyone will tell you that you have to make choices. You have to focus. You have to pick something to be the best at.
But is that true? And if it is, how exactly do you choose? When it comes to customers, for example, who do you pick?
- In-the-trench users… or the ’economic’ buyer?
- The customers you have the most of… or the customers who pay you the most?
- The customers you have today… or the customers you want tomorrow?
Yes, you should absolutely talk to your customers. But you still need to choose which ones you talk to.
Knowing you should make choices is one thing; having a framework for how to make those choices — and understanding why those choices exist — is quite another.
Product marketing
After wearing my copywriting hat for a while, my role morphed into something more akin to product marketing.
Product marketing – and positioning in particular - exists, in part, to answer these questions of which customers you should talk to and who you should focus on.
This became an intense interest for me, and by the early ’20s, I was obsessed with how to get a better handle on the “market” in “product/market fit” for my clients.
Again, I didn’t want to just help folks ‘speak business’; I wanted to help them win.
Maybe frameworks can help?
Positioning frameworks
There are a bunch of frameworks and methodologies product marketers use that purport to help you know who you should pitch and how you should pitch them. For example, do you:
- Position in a niche… or create a category?
- Target one clearly defined “ICP” (ideal customer profile)… or all buyers in a market?
- Create a ‘strategic narrative’ about broad change… or a focused sales narrative about your specific value?
I studied the typical approaches to answer these questions — classic positioning, category creation, storytelling, strategic narratives, Jobs to be Done, you name it.
Sometimes, these approaches worked great.
Sometimes, they didn’t.
That was weird.
This was the itch I couldn’t scratch.
I had the pieces, but I couldn’t put them together as a coherent whole.
And, it seemed, neither could other folks.
Expensive shots
Without any fundamentals to work with, you’re left taking (often quite expensive) shots in the dark.
One startup I briefly worked at spent six figures on narrative work — twice! — but very little stuck, and what stuck didn’t move the needle. I thought that was insane. All that effort, but no result.
Something was clearly missing. The need was real. Every startup has a position and a narrative, after all, and there are often millions — or hundreds of millions — of dollars riding on that narrative. This was high-stakes, high-leverage stuff. But there had to be a better way than blowing cash on speculative approaches that may or may not work.
The turning point
Fortunately, I stumbled across a theory that explained… well, pretty much everything. It was the missing piece, hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t some corny business framework, either. It was a theory of attention grounded in neuroscience from one of the most important thinkers of our time, a polymath called Dr Iain McGilchrist.
McGilchrist’s insight is that we have two fundamentally different modes of attention, or what I describe as:
- Radar: We have a right-hemisphere radar that looks out at changes in the environment, understands narrative, does pattern matching, and considers the whole.
- Laser beam: We have a left-hemisphere laser beam that focuses on the parts and pieces in front of us, using tools and manipulating the world, and how we map the world.
That is, of course, a great simplification, but that’s the gist of how we fundamentally ‘attend’ to the world around us.
It turns out this is immensely helpful for positioning:
- We can resolve competing approaches to narrative and positioning — we now know why some approaches do and don’t work (it comes down to matched — or mismatched – attention).
- We can resolve competing approaches to startup strategy — we all use these same modes of attention, and we know why some founders, investors, and operators prefer to go narrow and why some go broad.
- We can map attention to the technology lifecycle — we can tailor approaches to the early, mid, and mature stages of a company’s lifecycle.
It all comes down to attention preferences. This is, in my view, a very big deal. Such a big deal that I, being a giant nerd, wrote a really big, textbook-length deep dive.
The new default
I believe this new approach, one based on McGilchrist’s ‘hierarchy of attention’ as derived from modern neuroscience will be the new default for how we think about positioning in the future.
If positioning is about finding a position in the buyer’s mind, and McGilchrist’s theory is the best one we’ve got on how our minds attend to the world around us, then it stands to reason that his theory should be the basis of all positioning work.
I believe this is where enormous amounts of leverage lies.
It doesn’t make the iteration any less brutal, but it does mean we now know what we’re looking for; we know what fundamentals we’re dealing with.
These are the new fundamentals that underpin my new science-based positioning framework, one that you can read all about here on this site.
From the superficial to the fundamental
It took me years of searching, but now the pieces finally fit.
It’s been quite a journey. Over my career, I’ve worked with quantitative data, qualitative data, research, frameworks, and fundamentals. They all matter, and they all have their place, of course. But it wasn’t until I dug all the way down to the core fundamentals — the science that drives attention, innovation, and markets — that I really felt I had the tools to help folks answer the most pressing positioning and narrative questions they face.
I'm keen to share (and apply!) this new framework with you, too. If you’ve got a killer product but have been struggling for clarity in your positioning, I can help — let's chat.