Paul Evans is Founder & Chief Positioning Engineer at V2RSION, helping businesses unlock their full growth potential.
Half of all business-to-business (B2B) businesses fail after five years and few successfully scale. The industry may blame product-market fit, but the uncomfortable truth is often simpler: The best product doesn’t always win. This isn’t a product weakness; it’s a positioning weakness. We’re trying to solve 2025’s business challenges with a marketing concept that hasn’t evolved since 1981.
The Modern Growth Dilemma: Strong Product, Poor Positioning
B2B buying has become exponentially more complex. According to Emergence’s 2025 Beyond Benchmarks Report (registration required), 51% of buyers need more approvals to make purchases, 54% are pushing harder on price negotiations and 47% now require extensive internal education just to secure buy-in. Yet, most companies respond by optimizing operational efficiency with AI tools, solving the wrong problem.
When deals don’t get done and price becomes the primary focus, it’s not a sales failure—it’s a positioning failure. Your customers cannot clearly understand why they should choose you, making every decision unnecessarily difficult. In other words, your positioning hasn’t evolved to match the complexity buyers now navigate.
The Legacy Trap: The Stagnation Of A Core Marketing Principle
The positioning discipline established by Al Ries and Jack Trout’s 1981 book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, was designed for a different era when markets were slow and competitive landscapes were stable. Companies could craft a single, compelling story in an annual strategy session and expect it to last.
Today, markets shift monthly and competitors emerge overnight. Yet most traditional practitioners still operate as if it’s 1981, treating positioning as a one-and-done project. They conduct workshops, deliver pitch deck makeovers, refresh homepages with updated copy and consider the work complete, hoping it remains relevant as the world transforms. This static approach is fundamentally broken.
The Necessary Evolution: Introducing Positioning Engineering
The companies winning today don’t guess at positioning—they engineer it. Positioning engineering combines data analysis with structured frameworks to turn business strategy into an effective go-to-market positioning operating system that unlocks business growth potential.
The urgency is greater now that up to 90% of B2B buyers use AI for research and nearly 95% of buyers anticipate using generative AI to support purchase decisions within the next year. In other words, your first impression is often a machine-generated summary. This creates a dual challenge: Your position must persuade human buyers while also being structured for AI interpretation—something clever wordplay and abstract metaphors fail to do.
The Five Pillars Of An Intelligent Positioning System
Positioning engineering operates much like software, and is defined by the following core principles:
1. Differentiated Value: Answering ‘Why You?’ With Precision
Articulate your unique value anchored in competitive reality. It’s not about claiming superiority; it’s about establishing an unmistakable difference on terms that matter to buyers.
2. Distinctive Voice: Ensuring Your Message Cuts Through The Noise
Create authentic, ownable language that generates memorability. Distinctiveness ensures your positioning doesn’t just inform decision makers—it influences them.
3. Discoverable Presence: Optimizing For Both Human And AI Audiences
Structure your positioning for consistent interpretation across both minds and models. This requires semantic clarity, not just creative expression.
4. Directional Clarity: Aligning Your Entire Go-To-Market Strategy
Embed execution protocols that guide consistent activation across sales, marketing and product teams, eliminating the gap between strategy and reality.
5. Dynamic Adaptation: Future-Proofing Your Market Position
Build systematic adaptation into the framework. This way, market changes become positioning opportunities rather than threats.
Companies implementing intelligent positioning can gain measurable, compounding advantages. Sales conversations often become more effective and marketing investments can generate better returns. Most importantly, these companies develop positioning resilience. When markets shift, they respond from a position of systematic strength, not reactive confusion.
The question isn’t whether positioning will evolve. The revolution is here. The transformation requires moving beyond 40-year-old frameworks and replacing annual workshops with continuous intelligence. The companies making this evolution won’t just communicate more clearly—they can unlock growth potential that static approaches leave untapped.
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