Welcome to the Positioning Science newsletter!
First, if you haven’t already done so, subscribe to Positioning Science get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
Who is behind this?
Hi! I’m Luke Stevens, your humble author. Positioning Science is the brand I publish and consult under, and science-based positioning is my framework that I write about here, on my Positioning Science site, and in my books.
What’s the newsletter about?
As I write this, the newsletter is brand new, so I’ll be figuring out the exact format as I go, but I’m sitting on a mountain of content I’ve spent the last two years writing, and I’m incredibly keen to get it out there and share it with you.
What’s “science-based positioning”?
That period of writing was highly productive, but it wasn’t until my epic Positioning Science — Playbook was more or less finished that I landed on a description that summed up everything I’d been writing about.
That description was “science-based positioning” (SBP) and it describes a new approach to the 50+-year-old concept of positioning. SBP is based on the neuroscience research and philosophy of the legendary Dr Iain McGilchrist, particularly his theory of the hierarchy of attention, which is a modern scientific take on the left-brain/right-brain split and what it means for how we attend to the world around us.
Put another way, if positioning is about finding a ‘position’ you can occupy in the buyer’s mind, we now know far more about the mind (thanks particularly to McGilchrist), and we need to update the concept to match.
We also have relatively mature scientific approaches to new product adoption (diffusion) and brand marketing (as memory associations), along with how we run “N=1” experiments as a company, so SBP endeavors to incorporate those areas of science as well.
But what do you do with it?
I’m a practitioner, not an academic, so as much as I love the theory, we’ll spend a lot of time here discussing useful frameworks, case studies, and tips, too.
Science-based positioning boils down to four fundamental choices and actions — whether you choose to ride a wave and prove new value, drill down to a niche and find unique value, build memory associations by owning a message, and/or ride a winning position.
In terms of sales narratives, two of those choices are particularly crucial — proving new value on a wave or finding unique value for a niche — as they dictate the kind of story you tell. Those choices reflect the two fundamental modes of attention we all have as humans — our right-brain ‘radar’ and left-brain ‘laser beam’ (as I put it) — so we need to tailor our stories to match. I call this the story 1/story 2 approach, and once you see how it works, trust me, you’ll see it everywhere. It unlocks a lot.
That’s all before us!
I’d love to have you join me and (I hope) many other founders, investors, marketers (especially product marketers), and sales leaders as we explore this new frontier of science-based positioning, so please subscribe if you haven’t already done so and I’ll be in touch. 🙏🏻
— Luke
