Position to Win is for the challengers. Founders and CMOs who refuse to settle for second place.
This is a brand strategy podcast about the kind of strategy that actually moves a business. Which slot you own. Who you beat to own it. What your homepage, your sales call, and your investor one-pager have to say to back it up.
Every episode gives you two things. A tool you can use. And a sharper way to look at your own brand.
Tropicana lost 20% of unit sales in 6 weeks with better design. January 8, 2009. New cartons hit shelves. Cleaner type, a fresh glass of juice, $35M behind the launch. The work won every room it was shown in. Then it hit the aisle, and shoppers walked right past their own juice. Some assumed it was a house brand. Some reached for Minute Maid. By February 23 the old carton was back. Nothing was wrong with Tropicana. Category leader, north of $700M in that line. No crisis, no drift. A company t...
18 Aug 2026
Brand Repositioning
t's 2009 and Old Spice is dying. Your grandfather's brand. Retailers pulling it off the shelf. So the agency finds one thing: about 60% of body wash is bought by women. They build an ad aimed at men that sells what women want their men to smell like. Super Bowl weekend, 2010. Number one men's body wash in America. They never touched the soap. They changed the slot it occupies in your head. Same product, new position, and that is the whole game. Episode 12 of Positioning to Win. The four corne...
11 Aug 2026
Brand Diagnosis
Most stalled brands are solving the wrong problem. They pour marketing money on a branding problem. Or brand money on a marketing problem. Then wonder why nothing moves. Episode 11 of Position to Win is about telling the two apart. Diagnose before you spend. Send us Fan Mail
4 Aug 2026
Brand Recall
Snickers owns hunger. Red Bull owns exhaustion. Corona owns the beach. They trained you for years until the feeling itself does the selling. That's brand recall. Ep 10 of Position To Win. Send us Fan Mail
28 Jul 2026
Brand Persuasion
A female guppy always picks the brightest male. Until two males are equally bright. Then she picks the one the other females already chose. You do this too. So does every customer you have. Episode 9 of Position to Win is about persuasion, and why most brands only use a third of it. Aristotle named the whole system 2,400 years ago. Ethos, character and trust. Pathos, emotion. Logos, proof and logic. Most founders live in logos. They build the better product, show the better number...
21 Jul 2026
Brand Archetypes
Brand Archetypes along with the process I run: Opportunity. Which archetype roles your category already owns, and which are still open. Character. The open one you can credibly live. Counterweight. The secondary that keeps the primary honest. Expression: Expressed, suppressed, or distorted. Naming your archetype is the easy part. Building the company to live it is the challenge. Episode 8. Send us Fan Mail
14 Jul 2026
Brand Voice
Episode 7 of Position to Win. Brand voice. Belief, voice, tone. Why most brands argue about the top of the pyramid and never build the bottom. Why voice fails in the middle. Why Mailchimp's $12B exit was almost entirely about the sentences. Voice is strategy. Send us Fan Mail
7 Jul 2026
Brand Identity
Brand identity runs far wider than the logo. Most of the time someone meets your brand, they are looking at the color, the type, the photography, the way things are spaced on a page. The logo is one member of the cast. The whole system is what people actually feel. Episode 6 is a walk through that system: the marks, the type, the imagery, the spacing, and the small rules that let people recognize you from a thousand feet with the logo nowhere in sight. We have some fun with the h...
30 Jun 2026
Brand Name
Episode 5 is on naming. The Five Tests every name has to pass: distinctiveness, ownability, scalability, pronounceability, narrative load. The discovery method that pulls candidates out of your customers' own language. The cost of fixing a name later runs three to twenty times what getting it right would have cost. A name is the most permanent decision in branding. Choose it the way you would name a child. Send us Fan Mail
23 Jun 2026
Brand Architecture
A national food company hired my studio with a problem they could feel but couldn't name. They powered other people's brands. The meal kits, the grocery private label, the food-media darlings, all ran on their infrastructure. None of it carried their name. For over a year, leadership argued the same question in different rooms. Should we build our own consumer brand? Should we be visible? Invisible? Both? Underneath all of it sat an architecture question. And they couldn't move on naming, ide...
17 Jun 2026
Brand ICP
Ask a founder who their customer is and you'll get a category. Enterprise SaaS. Recreational cannabis. Health-conscious consumers. None of those is an ICP. They're hiding places. This episode is about the most underrated decision in brand strategy, and the one most companies fake. Ideal Customer Profile. We do it backwards. We start with who it isn't. It is easier to write down who you'd walk away from than to invent the perfect customer from a blank page. Most revenue leaders can list five c...
9 Jun 2026
Brand Strategy
Most companies do not have a brand strategy. They have a list of activities. This episode is about the single mental habit that separates the two. Strategy is choice. Activity is addition. One closes doors. The other refuses to. We will cover the 200-page brand document that taught me what real strategy is not. The three "brand pillars" that could have been written for any competitor. And the question every strategist should ask before signing off on anything: What did we decide not to do? Pl...
9 Jun 2026
Rock, Paper, Scissors
A simple model for understanding what kind of company you are right now. And who you can actually beat. Scissors is the startup. Sharp focus. One ICP. One edge. Rock is the proven system. Durable. Repeatable. Paper is the giant. Suite. Spend. Distribution. Each one beats a different opponent. And almost every founder picks the wrong fight. Scissors loses when it tries to act like Rock. Rock loses when it tries to act like Paper. The smartest competitive move is almost always behind you. Not a...
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
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