TL;DR: Your message fails before the channel does. Most marketing teams diagnose a distribution problem when they actually have a positioning problem — they are describing their product instead of their customer’s world. The fix isn’t better creative or more budget. It’s starting over from the customer’s perspective, which requires listening before writing.
What You’ll Learn
- The structural difference between storytelling and product telling — and why default copy defaults to the wrong one
- How to diagnose a positioning problem from the outside before touching any copy
- The customer listening method that consistently surfaces the real dissonance
- Why positioning is not a one-time exercise, especially in fast-moving categories
- The simple test that tells you whether your message is working before you spend a dollar on media
1. The Default Mode Is Product Telling
There’s a pattern that shows up across almost every company that struggles with messaging. The website leads with features. The ads open with the product name. The sales deck begins with “we are a platform that helps teams…”
Every word describes the company’s output. The customer has to do all the translation work: figuring out whether they have the problem this solves, whether this solution fits their situation, and whether any of it is worth their attention. Many don’t bother.
Product telling is the default because it is easier. You know what you built. The features are concrete and accurate. Writing about the customer requires understanding them deeply enough to reflect their experience back — and that’s harder, slower work that doesn’t fit neatly into a campaign timeline.
2. What Storytelling Actually Does
Storytelling starts with the customer’s world. It names the problem the customer already feels, in the language they use to describe it — before the product appears.
Compare:
“We are an AI-powered analytics platform that helps marketing teams track performance across channels in real time.”
versus:
“Your marketing team is making budget decisions based on data that’s three attribution models removed from what actually happened. Here’s what that costs you.”
The second version doesn’t lead with the product. It leads with a situation the customer recognizes. If they’re in it, they lean in before you’ve mentioned anything about what you sell. The product becomes the resolution to a tension they already feel — not a solution looking for a problem.
Byron Sharp’s research in How Brands Grow reinforces this at scale: brands grow primarily by building mental availability — the probability that a customer thinks of a brand in a relevant buying situation. That availability is built through messages that connect to situations customers actually experience, not through features they have to evaluate in the abstract.
3. How to Diagnose a Positioning Problem
The most reliable way to find a positioning problem is not to rewrite the copy. It’s to listen before you write anything.
That means sitting in on sales calls, reading support tickets, and having direct conversations with customers who bought and customers who didn’t. The goal is to write down everything surprising — the words customers use that your team doesn’t, the problems they describe that don’t appear in your marketing, the reasons they give for choosing you that don’t match your stated value proposition.
What you’re looking for is dissonance: the gap between what the company thinks it’s selling and what customers think they’re buying. This gap is almost always present, and it is almost always larger than expected.
Once you find it, the repositioning work is usually not about changing what you offer. It is about changing which problem you lead with.
4. Positioning Is Not a One-Time Exercise
Categories evolve. Competitors enter with better messaging. The way customers describe their problems shifts as markets mature.
A message that resonated two years ago may have been accurate then and is now stale — not because you changed, but because the context around you did. This is particularly true in technology, where a differentiated product can become table stakes within a product cycle, and a message built on that differentiation loses its reason to exist.
The implication: customer listening is not a launch activity. It is an ongoing practice. For most companies, checking in every six to twelve months is sufficient to catch drift before it affects conversion. For companies in fast-moving categories, the interval needs to be shorter.
The companies that get this right treat positioning as a discipline — not a deliverable that gets handed off after the brand refresh.
5. The Test
Here is a useful test for any piece of marketing: read it from the customer’s perspective and count how many sentences pass before the customer recognizes their own problem.
If the answer is more than two, the message is product telling. The customer hasn’t been invited into the story yet.
The fix is not more features, a longer explanation, or a better tagline. It is starting over from the customer’s world: the situation they are in, the frustration they feel, and the outcome they are trying to reach. The product enters the story as the solution to that — not as the opening line.
This framework was developed through direct client work — situations where the brief said “improve campaign performance” and the diagnosis revealed the campaigns were executing perfectly against the wrong message. The pattern repeated across industries: technology, telecom, consumer goods. The channel was rarely the problem. The foundation usually was.
FAQ
Q: How do you know if you have a positioning problem vs. a targeting problem?
If your message lands well with the people who do see it (high engagement, strong conversion-to-close rates from qualified leads), but you’re not reaching enough of them, it’s a targeting or distribution problem. If people see the message and don’t engage, or engage but don’t convert, the problem is usually the message itself — and often the positioning underneath it.
Q: We’ve done customer research. Our messaging is based on it. Why isn’t it working?
Survey-based research often produces what customers say they value, not what actually drives their decisions. The more reliable input comes from conversations and call recordings — situations where customers are describing their problem in their own words, without being prompted by your framework. The language customers use unprompted is often very different from how they respond to your survey options.
Q: How often should we revisit positioning?
For most B2B companies, a structured review every 6–12 months is sufficient. Triggers that should prompt an earlier review: a significant change in competitive landscape, a product expansion that changes who you serve, declining conversion rates across channels without a clear tactical explanation, or new sales team members reporting that prospects “don’t get it” in early calls.
Additional Resources
From the Zaitz Marketing Knowledge Library:
- Brand vs. Performance Is a False Choice — How brand-building and performance marketing work together when the message is right
- Your Marketing Problem Is Probably a Business Strategy Problem — Why positioning problems often sit upstream of the marketing function
- Why Your Attribution Model Is Lying to You — What happens when you try to optimize distribution before fixing the message
External Reading:
- Summary of Byron Sharp’s Laws of Brand Growth — The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute on mental availability and how brands grow
- How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know — Sharp’s core argument on evidence-based brand building
Want a second read on your measurement setup?
Start with a Growth Architecture Review. We will map your channel mix, audit your attribution, and show you where the real leverage is.
Book a Conversation →