Why Does Every Positioning Exercise Come Back Generic?

You have the deck somewhere.

Two days offsite, a facilitator, sticky notes on a wall, and a document at the end with words like trusted, innovative, enterprise-grade and customer-obsessed in it.

Everyone nodded. Nobody argued. And nothing changed.

So here’s the question worth asking. Why does that keep happening to smart people who paid real money?

Why does a workshop produce category language?

Because a room can only recombine what the people in it already say.

Everyone on your team reads the same analyst reports. They watch the same competitors, attend the same conferences, and absorb the same vocabulary. When you put eight of them around a table and ask “what should we say about ourselves,” every candidate answer is drawn from that shared pool.

Your competitor has the same pool. So does the vendor two floors up.

A workshop is a recombination engine. Give it public inputs and it returns public outputs, arranged more neatly. That’s the Sea of Sameness doing its work, and it is produced by diligence rather than laziness. The room did the exercise correctly.

What comes out is Message Mediocrity: what a company sounds like when every sentence it publishes is defensible and none of it is worth repeating. It is anonymity produced on purpose, by competent people, following standard advice.

That’s why nobody argued in the meeting. There was nothing there to argue with.

What does generic actually look like?

Here’s a test you can run in one search, and it costs nothing.

Search for the phrase “single pane of glass.” It’s the standard promise in enterprise cloud management: one screen, every system, no more switching between consoles.

You’ll find IBM explaining it, Genpact selling it, Fortra promising it, and a dozen more.

Then look at the other half of the results. CGI has a piece called “the myth of the single pane of glass.” So does BETSOL. TechTarget reports it’s “still elusive.”

Both sides are commodities now. The promise is generic, and so is debunking the promise. An entire market reached consensus on a phrase, then reached consensus on being skeptical of the phrase, and neither move distinguishes anybody.

That’s what a positioning exercise produces when it works exactly as designed.

Do the people who wrote it know?

Most of them do, which is the part I find genuinely useful.

Wynter surveyed 100 B2B SaaS marketing leaders at companies above $50 million in revenue and asked them to rate their own brand’s distinctiveness. Here’s how the people responsible for the messaging graded their own work:

Six percent. And people generally overrate their own work, so treat that as the optimistic reading.

The exercise isn’t failing quietly. The people who ran it can tell.

Where does the non-generic version come from?

From something the founder already said, usually in passing, usually without thinking it mattered.

Verge Technologies is a database-infrastructure company. Its founder, Jimmy Jobe, is a former enterprise CIO. The Viral Genius Institute built its category, Cloud Convergence, and Verge uses that language on its own site today.

It did not come out of a workshop. It came out of more than a dozen recorded conversations across eight months.

Two things came from those recordings that no session would have produced.

The first is the language for the problem. Jimmy described IT teams logging in and out of four different cloud consoles every morning, maintaining separate expertise for each one. That got named Swivel-Chair Management, and the condition underneath it Cloud Silo Fragmentation. Neither phrase existed to be picked off a wall. Both came from a man describing his own working life.

The second is more instructive. Somewhere in those conversations Jimmy mentioned, casually, that his system moves a live database between cloud providers with zero transaction loss and full consistency. His phrasing: your end users never know that database moved.

He said it the way you’d mention your commute.

It happens this way every time. The most valuable sentence a founder owns is the one they say without emphasis. To them it’s just how it’s done. That’s the definition of tacit knowledge, and it’s why no workshop surfaces it. A workshop asks people to reach for their best material. Nobody reaches for the thing they think is ordinary.

Named and made explicit, that sentence becomes a One Unforgettable Idea: the single idea a founder owns so completely that they stop being compared and become their own category.

What argues against this?

Three things, and the first is the strongest.

Plenty of good positioning has come out of structured sessions. April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome lays out a positioning method she publishes as an exercise, and it’s worth your time.

So here’s what actually decides the outcome: who gets questioned.

Go around the table collecting everyone’s input and you’ll surface the group’s shared vocabulary, which is the category’s vocabulary. Spend the same two hours with one person, asking the founder why they do it that way, and you’ll surface something only that person knows.

Same room. Same whiteboard. Completely different output.

A category name is not the finish line. Naming the problem gets a market talking. It does not, by itself, make a specific buyer act. Those are separate jobs with separate work behind them, and treating the name as the destination is its own failure mode.

The survey above is thin evidence. 100 respondents, self-reported, published by a company that sells message testing. It points in a direction. It does not prove a mechanism, and I’d rather say that than lean on it harder than it can hold.

What should you do instead?

Three moves, in order.

• Swap the name. Take your current positioning statement, put your closest competitor’s name on it, and read it again. If it still reads as true, you have category language.
• Find the sentence nobody would dispute you on, then throw it away. Keep hunting until you find a claim a competitor would actually argue with. That argument is the position.
• Get interviewed rather than facilitated. Have someone whose job is to notice ask you why you do things the way you do, and record it. Watch for the moments you say “well, obviously.” Those are the ones.

The material you need has been in the building the whole time. It was never going to show up on a sticky note, because the person who has it doesn’t think it’s worth writing down.

That’s the work the Excavation does, and it’s an interview for exactly this reason.