The big idea: Science-based positioning (2x2 inside)
The big idea: Science-based positioning (2x2 inside)
Introducing a new approach to positioning for B2B tech companies — new fundamentals, new choices, & new outcomes. Get started with the simple 1-2-3-4 framework and the science-based positioning 2x2.
Here’s the science-based positioning framework in a nutshell. Don’t miss the 2x2 — it’s intense, but it summarizes everything we’ll be talking about!
— Luke
Many companies are trying to find market gold with what amounts to medieval alchemy. What they really need is modern science. That’s why I created science-based positioning.
Science-based positioning is a new approach to B2B positioning for tech companies. It updates the 50+ year-old original concept of positioning with new and known science on a customer, market, and company level.
This gives us:
New fundamentals: The point of science-based positioning is to use these fundamentals to build momentum in your market so you win more logos and grow your ARR.
Clear positioning choices: To get there, we go from fundamental modes of attention to four distinct positioning strategies and the choices of prove it, find it, build it, or, once you’ve found a winning position, ride it.
Stronger sales narratives: Stronger inputs mean stronger outputs, and with new fundamentals and clear positioning choices, we can craft exceptionally well-targeted sales narratives and broader clarity strategies to land our position in the buyer’s mind.
All of this is intended to help you win more deals, win in your segment, and ultimately build a company that wins big. And if you’re a venture-backed startup, that’s the name of the game.
From Clarity to clarity
That ability to win comes primarily through clarity. Clarity in your story, clarity about your customers and your segment, and clarity around the bets you’re making as a company.
And clarity doesn’t come easily, as I know all too well.
I (Luke Stevens, hi!) coined the term “science-based positioning” in 2024 to clarify my own message and positioning after writing the book I eventually dubbed Positioning Science — Playbook. I’m immensely proud of that book — positioning is a serious topic that deserves serious treatment. However, I quickly realized that — whoops — I needed a better position than “I’ve written a very long book on positioning.”
I needed more clarity, as it were. (Which was ironic, given “Clarity” was the working title of the playbook.)
I needed those first rungs on the ladder. I needed a framework that captured all the hard-won ideas in Positioning Science — Playbook in a handful of bullet points. I needed a simple introduction to this new world of science-based positioning.
So here it is.
(If you’ve also got some big ideas, built a big product, or churned through several possibilities but need clarity, this format might offer a few clues for you, too.)
Positioning 1-2-3-4
This is the simplest formulation of science-based positioning I’ve come up with — my 1-2-3-4 framework. Science-based positioning is:
One big idea: Positioning was originally about creating a position in the buyer’s mind. Now, 50 years after the concept’s original introduction, we have a much more scientific understanding of buyers’ minds, hence the need for science-based positioning (SBP).(I’ll elaborate on this further below.)
Two modes of attention: The key scientific breakthrough in our understanding of the mind and our attention in SBP comes from Dr. Iain McGilchrist, who coined the new split-brain theory ’the hierarchy of attention'.
Three areas of science: SBP takes this concept of attention and combines it with modern market science (diffusion and brand), along with N=1 company experiments. That is, we use science for minds, markets, and go-to-market in the hope of finding a winning position that drives product/market fit and compounding growth.
Four strategies: Your positioning choices in SBP boil down to, as mentioned, prove it, find it, own it, and ride it. That is, you can pick a wave to ride and prove your value; you can look at your customer base and find your best-fit customers; you can own your message and build name/need brand memories over time; and ultimately, you can ride your winning position to fame and fortune.
That’s years of work, writing, hair-pulling, and some seriously skeptical looks from my eternally patient wife distilled into a framework you can count on one hand… with a pinky to spare.
And — in true consultant fashion — I have a neat 2x2 that captures those positioning choices:
Warning: it’s pretty intense!
The SBP 2x2
You were warned! (I kid.) I don’t expect this image to mean much right off the bat, dear reader, but if you keep reading, that’s what we’ll be unpacking here — catching broad waves, zeroing in on niches, and/or building brand memories over time, with the net result being a killer narrative you can run with.
That’s the fifth part of the framework, by the way — the outputs, i.e., your sales narrative and clarity strategy. (So I guess that’s your pinky accounted for, too.)
In terms of the implications, then, the methodology is pretty simple:
Inputs: Based on your strategy and attention preferences, you collect inputs from your market, including what you’ve learned, what your customers say (e.g., in sales calls), and what your original vision is or was.
Narrative: The fastest way to test your positioning is by distilling it into a master sales narrative, one that’s tailored to the two modes of attention of the prospects you’re targeting. You might go big-picture for execs or outbound folks, or get into the specifics for end users or technical folks. (This is the ‘story 1/story 2’ balance that drives your narrative.)
Clarity strategy: With positioning and a narrative that resonates with buyers (or customers who recently bought), you can then go to the rest of your market. To do that, you need a clarity strategy where, as the name suggests, you need to be as clear and consistent as possible with your message across all your customer touchpoints, laddering folks up from “huh?” to shut up and take my money.
To get a little meta for a moment, this is how I, as a positioning consultant, walk the talk. To carve out my own position in the market, I have created a new concept — science-based positioning — boiled it down to a simple framework (the 1-2-3-4 approach above) and created a brand for it (“Positioning Science”) that I can operate under.
The two sides of positioning
There are two sides of the positioning coin — the clarity you need internally to focus on developing a clear position and the clarity prospects need to experience externally so they actually hear what you have to say and have it resonate in their mind or memory.
That is, there’s the position you aspire to and the position that actually exists in a prospect’s mental map of the world.
Positioning work in decks and documents is useful for the first half of that equation — the positioning you’re aspiring to internally — but the difference between positioning as a winning strategy and positioning as a wish that won’t come true is whether the magic happens in the prospect’s mind.
And we know a lot more about minds than we used to.
What makes that magic happen, then, is when the science of positioning and the art of crafting a value proposition connect in such a way that the light goes on for customers and you tap into something they genuinely care about, will pay for, and recognize you as the unique or first-to-mind source of that value.
And in the hyper-competitive world of B2B tech, that’s hard!
The B2B challenge
This is a particular challenge for B2B tech companies due to:
Innovation: The products may be new and innovative, i.e., unknown and risky to a conservative B2B buyer.
Complexity: The product might be technical and complex; perhaps it’s a sprawling enterprise platform or a technological breakthrough that’s hard to explain to normies.
Change: Markets evolve rapidly with new competitors, tech, and trends arriving on the scene, and sometimes simply keeping up can be a battle in its own right.
But there are great advantages, too, including:
Buyers who care: We’re not selling toothpaste or toilet paper here; we’re selling to folks with very particular needs whose career trajectory may depend on the success of our products, which makes them a fascinating source of insight and feedback.
Buyers who talk: Likewise, we’re not sticking products on shelves and hoping a focus group will have all the answers — every sales conversation is a chance to discover and refine what works for your positioning, especially in the early days.
Products that evolve: Best of all, we control the product and market — we can tailor the product to the market, evolve it to suit a new position, or, in a classic positioning sense, find the market that makes the most sense for the product we’ve got.
That is, in positioning, we have the “market” in “product/market fit” as a major lever to work with — one that’s often under-explored and underutilized!
One big idea
It’s the “market” in “product/market fit” where positioning is all important. And it was ever thus. For example, have you ever felt like this?
“There are just too many companies, too many products, too much marketing noise.”
Modern B2B tech market, let me introduce you to the 1970s B2C American consumer market, where the advice was simple:
“In our overcommunicated society […] a company must create a “position” in the prospects’ mind.”
Both quotes are from the classic 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by the late, great Al Ries and Jack Trout, who originally began writing about positioning as New York City ad men in 1969.
Fast forward 50-odd years, and we know far more about how the mind works.
We know more both in terms of fundamental attention, which happens to explain the fundamental “go big”/“go niche” split we see in tech all the time, as well as memory in classic marketing terms, too.
This is the new science that has emerged in the decades since Ries and Trout first wrote about positioning. It confirms some of their suspicions and corrects others. We’re not going to dwell on the past, though — science-based positioning is ultimately about making sense of modern approaches and modern science to ensure you really do have the best chance of creating that position in the modern B2B buyer’s mind.
So that’s our one big idea to start with — this science exists! It gives us new fundamentals to work with! Fundamentals that are especially important when it comes to positioning in high-consideration, high-attention contexts like B2B sales.
Especially when, it turns out, as humans we have two fundamentally different ways of ‘attending’ to the world. If we can better understand these two modes of attention, we can untangle and clarify how we do positioning, write sales narratives, and even how we do startups in the first place.
That’s the power of science-based positioning.
It’s vastly superior to the all-too-often wish-based approach of category creation or startup story telling that looks more like alchemy than science, and often leaves folks spinning their wheels for years, wondering why their narrative just won’t click.
To understand why sales narratives often fall flat and positioning doesn’t seem to land, we first need to understand the two modes of attention. Meet me in the next post:
