AI has made ‘positioning judgment’ an even more important skill 

The internet, your inbox and your brain have probably never been more jam-packed full of marketing messages than they are today, largely thanks to the “generative” part of generative AI. 

And if you’re a reader of The AI Edit, there’s a decent chance you’re one of the people not just receiving AI-generated messages but creating them, too, as part of your business’s marketing and lead-gen work.

If one or both of my above assumptions are true, then here’s a third: Every day, as you scan and review the stuff you’re creating and consuming, you’re having to exercise a special kind of judgment – let’s call it positioning judgment – more than you perhaps even realise.

What do I mean by ‘positioning judgment’?

Positioning is how companies try to occupy a certain ‘position’ in your mind. If you need an AI notetaking tool for meetings, you might think of Granola or Fireflies or Otter, because they’ve worked hard to build that awareness and salience. If you need a notetaking tool but you work in a regulated industry, that will be a more niche position in your mind for brands to fight over. 

(Side note: It was interesting to see Granola, which most users think of as a simple enough notetaking app, raise a $125M Series C funding round on a pitch that hinged on the tool’s ability to capture not just meeting notes but business context. One positioning for their customers today. Another positioning for the VCs they’re trying to convince there’s enough “enterprise value” at stake to give them a $1.5bn price tag.)

Positioning is ultimately something we do in our own heads as buyers, but we’re influenced and manipulated along the way by brands and their marketing. 

Having positioning judgment is kind of like having an understanding of how that manipulation is done, based on a familiarity with the fundamental workings of positioning and messaging. 

If you can make your positioning judgment a more conscious, proactive instinct, you begin to see it working. When you’re presented with a piece of marketing content, you’ll notice you’re making very quick assessments and judgment calls about factors like:

• How exactly is this company trying to position itself, according to what I’m seeing? 
• Is there actually a clear and distinctive positioning there at all? Or is it vague, generic or meaningless? 
• If there is something there, is it relevant and attractive to their target market?
• Does it match with my own take on the product? If not, why not?
• Is it credible? Do I believe what they say enough to give them my money?

When does having good positioning judgment help you?

I’ve worked on positioning and messaging projects for B2B companies for more than a decade, helping them define exactly what it is that makes them different, and how to communicate it to the people who need to hear it.

But it was only recently (when I was trying to come up with an angle for this article) that I realised, as a kind of side effect to all this work, the wider value of positioning judgment. That is, as well as being able to position your own company or your clients’ companies, positioning judgment helps you to analyse other people’s positioning work. 

The weird thing now is that “other people” isn’t just your competitors; it might also be the AI bots you’ve asked to do your work for you.

So, with a bit of practice, it becomes quite easy to peer through the marketing veil to see the positioning strategy (or lack of strategy) behind it – in situations like these:

When you want to quickly analyse your competitors’ positioning​ – to help you frame your own offering relative to their strengths and weaknesses. 

When you’re being pitched or sold to – not least by all the AI tools and platforms trying to win you over. When you understand the basics of positioning from both sides of the table, you become much better at identifying real, credible value – as well as sniffing out bullshit – in others.

When you’re reviewing your own (human or AI-generated) content – to ensure, for example, that your lead-gen messaging and content faithfully and effectively reflects and reinforces your positioning​. This is especially important if you’re using AI tools for the production of things like email copy or landing pages. 

On this last point, you’ll have heard a similar observation about people in creative professions, like writers and designers: As they use GenAI more, they effectively become more of a creative director, steering and editing the work rather than starting from scratch. For this you need taste and judgment.

I think the same holds true when you’re QAing AI-generated content, reviewing it not just for creative standards but for the extent to which it adheres to (and strengthens) your positioning strategy.

AI fluency requires positioning judgment

I first came across the term AI fluency on The AI Edit. As this post says, it's “not a single skill. It’s a set of competencies that work together.” The kind of things business leaders (and anyone working with AI) need to understand in order to use AI effectively and responsibly. 

To the list of competencies that make up AI fluency, I’d add positioning judgment. It’s crucial not only when you’re assessing and investing in AI tools to make sure you’re actually getting what you need (judgment of their positioning as evidenced in their marketing), but when you’re using those AI tools in your own marketing (judgment of the AI outputs’ adherence to your business’s positioning).

So how do you improve your positioning judgment?

Luckily you don’t need to make a career out of positioning work, or have been through a proper positioning process, to sharpen your own positioning judgement. The tricks and tells can be picked up quickly. 

Even in a homepage H1, a sales pitch opening line, or any kind of micropitch*, you’ll find the same patterns at play. Patterns you can use to reverse engineer the positioning decision-making that led to the output in front of you. 

(*Shameless plug: Micropitch is the term we use in a book I co-wrote, called Eight Words or Fewer: Distil your difference into the perfect micropitch, which goes into all of this in more detail, if you’re interested.) 

A simple framework to help you judge positioning work

When it’s positioning itself, a company will try to give clear and specific answers to the following core questions. And whichever answers give them the most relevant, important, valuable, credible hook – that answer (or combination of answers) will give them the angle or identifier for their message or story.

1. Why must their story be told now? 

What’s the demand trigger or big-picture context that they’re using as the backdrop for their story? 

If you see them leading with this hook, ask yourself:

What specifics do they offer about why they’re the best company to buy from in this context? It’s all well and good to set the scene, but they won’t get very far touting “Financial planning for the AI age” without explaining what exactly that means. 

2. What market category do they want to be in?

Are they in a recognisable category? Or are they claiming to have created a new one? 

If you see them leading with this hook, ask yourself:

Categories are big things, so how have they chosen to niche down within theirs? Have they combined a category hook with another hook, eg positioning themselves as “The CRM for busy dogwalkers”. If they’re claiming to create a new category, does it make any sense for them to do so or is it all misjudged hype? (Most companies that try to create a category do so too early. They haven’t secured a foothold in an early market, using an established category-led or use case-led positioning.)

3. What defines their ideal customer?

ICP is one of the things companies find it difficult to agree and stay focused on. You might see them leading with customer traits, whether they’re firmographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioural, whatever.

If you see them leading with this hook, ask yourself:

Is it clear that they’re speaking directly to someone specific, and is that person someone like you? If you can answer that question clearly, you can qualify yourself in or out quickly. But if you’re not even clear who their ICP is, chances are they’re not clear either. 

4. What do they help customers achieve?

Some companies will go for a straightforward value proposition that says they help you do a specific task or workflow really well, or in a special way. Some will hype up a big problem and cast themselves as your saviours. Or they might focus on outcomes and higher-level benefits, like time and money savings. 

If you see them leading with this hook, ask yourself:

What am I actually getting, how am I getting it, and how much am I getting? If you’re attracted to outcomes or benefits-led messaging, great, but always trace it back to something concrete that this company can give you better than the rest, for a specific, special reason. 

5. What are their competitive alternatives?

What are their potential customers using instead, whether it’s another product, a home-grown solution or nothing at all? This is what they’re trying to de-position, telling you you need to make a change.

If you see them leading with this hook, ask yourself:

Is the way they’re framing their competitive set relevant to your situation? And is the comparison a fair one? (The next question will help.)

6. What makes them better than the alternatives?

What value or USP do they offer that none of the alternatives can? It might be a new approach, industry experience, a proprietary technology or data set, and so on. 

If you see them leading with this hook, ask yourself:

Is there something specific and measurable that they’re actually better at? (Yes, it’s still depressingly common for companies to just say “Better document management” or whatever, without actually giving clear details on how exactly they do it better, how much better, and how they’re going to prove it to you. 

Go forth and exercise your positioning judgment (on yourself and others)

The onslaught of marketing content (about AI, by AI, increasingly for AI) is not going to let up. So do yourself a favour and look for chances to exercise your positioning judgment. It will make you a better seller and a better buyer.  

(Incidentally, I asked AI to draft a v1 of this article from an outline. But it wasn’t very good, and it didn’t reflect my own positioning as someone who likes to think they have some interesting things to say on the topic of positioning. So I scrapped the AI stuff and wrote it myself.)

Adam Ketterer specialises in positioning, messaging and writing for B2B companies. He’s a co-founder of B2B branding and marketing agency Beneath, and co-author of Eight Words or Fewer: Distil your difference into the perfect micropitch.