by nicvonschneider | Sep 8, 2026 | Growth Marketing, Market Positioning
When a startup enters a mature market, the obvious advice is usually the least useful: build a better product, run more ads, hire more salespeople, and compete for a larger share of the category. That approach assumes the startup can win on the same playing field as...
by nicvonschneider | Sep 1, 2026 | Growth Marketing, Market Positioning
Market expansion rarely fails because a company cannot deliver more work. It fails because the company becomes less specific about why the market should choose it. This is the scaling paradox: the larger a professional services firm becomes, the more pressure it feels...
by nicvonschneider | Jul 28, 2026 | Competitive Differentiation, Market Positioning
We started outlining this article after a positioning project with a mid-market manufacturing company that had a familiar problem: they were not losing because their product was weak. They were losing because the market could not tell why their product mattered more...
by nicvonschneider | Jun 30, 2026 | Brand Strategy, Market Positioning
Positioning becomes measurable the moment leadership stops treating it like a tagline and starts treating it like a market behavior system. That observation came back into focus during a recent strategy review with a mid-market company operating in a category where...
by nicvonschneider | May 3, 2026 | Market Positioning
I’ve seen dozens of different definitions of positioning. Every single one seems to inherently ignore the actual point of positioning. Positioning is meant to be an aggressive strategy. Yet every practitioner of positioning seems to confidently expect...
