How to write a positioning that actually constrains decisions

A positioning that cannot forbid a piece of work is not a positioning. It is a mood board with a sentence attached. Australian organisations produce those sentences at industrial volume. They survive the workshop, they decorate the first twelve slides of a pitch, and they expire the moment a category manager needs to decide whether a new flavour belongs on the shelf.

The failure is not a shortage of workshops. It is a shortage of refusal. A usable positioning is a rule for saying no. It has to work on a Tuesday in a store at Moorabbin, in a legal review of a TV script, and in a capital committee that will not fund another brand film. If those three rooms cannot use the same sentence, you do not have a strategy. You have stationery.

This is a strategy problem before it is a language problem. The craft is to write a constraint that still sounds like a brand.

What most Australian positionings actually are

Open a brand book from a listed retailer, a bank, a university or a state agency and you will find a familiar pile. Authentic. Inclusive. Bold. Human. Progressive, but not in a way that would trouble a board. Sometimes the pile is dressed as a purpose. Sometimes it is a brand idea in six words that could sit on a superannuation fund, a chicken shop or a toll-road operator without anyone noticing the swap.

The pile is not harmless. It licenses everything. A line that can justify a celebrity partnership, a discount mechanic, a sustainability claim and a new sub-brand is a line that will be asked to justify all of them. The work then fragments. Marketing runs campaigns that operations cannot staff. Legal waters every claim until the advertisement is a shrug. Procurement writes a tender that asks agencies to "bring the brand to life" because nobody can say what would count as death.

Coles and Woolworths can both be "for Australian families" on a Monday and still fight each other on unit price, private label and loyalty by Wednesday. Bunnings can be the warehouse that still feels like a sausage in the car park, and that sentence, however worn, at least tells you what a marble-and-brass flagship would violate. Qantas can talk about the spirit of Australia and still have to answer the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission when the experience and the advertising part company. The market does not reward adjectives. It rewards organisations that will not do the tempting thing.

A positioning is not a personality. Personality is what the writing sounds like after the constraint is set. The constraint comes first.

The three-user test

Write the sentence. Then hand it to three people who do not work in brand.

The chief financial officer needs to know what not to fund. If the positioning cannot distinguish a brand-building television burst from a cooperative catalogue that a supplier will pay for, the CFO will treat brand as a discretionary tax on the P&L. A good line gives them a filter. We invest in X because it is the only way the position remains true. We do not invest in Y, even when Y is cheaper and the sales team is loud, because Y trains the customer to expect the opposite of what we claim.

The lawyer needs to know what not to say. Australian Consumer Law is not a vibe. Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law, in Schedule 2 of the Competition and Consumer Act, prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct. The ACCC does not care that your purpose workshop felt sincere. If the claim cannot be substantiated in the store, on the app, in the product disclosure statement or at the boarding gate, it is a liability. A positioning that requires puffery to sound alive is already broken. The lawyer should be able to take the sentence and mark the claims that need evidence, the comparisons that will need to be true at the time of publication, and the words that should never appear in a script.

The store manager needs to know what to do when a customer is standing in front of them. This is the user the workshop forgets. A positioning that only works in a brand film will be rewritten, in practice, by whoever is rostered on. If the line says you are the helpful expert, the manager needs to know whether that means they can spend five minutes on a recommendation or whether the roster assumes a scan-and-go. If the line says you are the no-fuss option, they need permission to refuse a service that would make the brand look boutique. The shop floor is where positionings go to be tested, not decorated.

If any of those three users asks what the sentence really means, you are not done. Rewrite until they can act without you.

Write a prohibition, not a poem

A working positioning has four parts, and only one of them is allowed to be pretty.

First, the claim. One sentence about the value you intend to be chosen for. Not a list. Not a journey. A claim a competitor could, in theory, contest. "The bank that still answers the phone" is a claim. "A bank that cares" is a fog. "The supermarket that is cheapest on the basket you actually buy" is a claim, and it will drag you into unit pricing, own brand and the ACCC's interest in how prices are shown. That is a feature. Claims that cannot get you into trouble are usually claims that cannot get you chosen.

Second, the frame. Who you are claiming it against, and in what category the customer is actually choosing. Australian categories are often narrower than the global template suggests. People do not choose "mobility". They choose a weekly shop, a home loan, a flight to Perth, a trade account at the hardware warehouse. If you cannot name the choice, you are writing about your org chart. The architecture of the group may contain several of those choices. The positioning for each brand still has to pick one.

Third, the proof. Not a mood film. The operational fact that makes the claim expensive to copy. Rostered butchers. A call-centre target that is staffed. A returns policy that finance has agreed to fund. A private-label specification that procurement will not dilute. If the proof is a campaign, you have the order backwards. Campaigns spend the proof. They do not create it.

Fourth, the forbidden moves. Write them in the same document, in plain English, as a list the organisation is prepared to be embarrassed by if it breaks them. No celebrity if the claim is expertise. No blanket percentage-off if the claim is everyday value. No "family" language if the offer is built for trades. No sustainability seal that the lawyer cannot evidence. This is the part most brand books omit, because it makes the next agency pitch harder. That is the point.

If the sentence cannot kill a campaign idea that the room was excited about, it is not a positioning. It is a caption.

Practise the kill test in the room. Put a live idea on the table — a sponsorship, a limited flavour, a fintech partnership, a colourway for a football club — and ask whether the positioning requires you to stop. If the group can talk its way around every idea, the sentence is serving consensus. Consensus is how Australian brand work becomes beige.

What the sentence has to survive in this market

Australia is a small, concentrated, regulated market. A positioning that was written for a Californian category-creation story will not travel. The grocery duopoly, the big four banks, the domestic aviation pair, the hardware warehouse that functions as a category of one: these are not backdrops. They are the choice architecture. Your sentence has to make sense inside that architecture, or it is tourism.

Regulation sits on the sentence whether you invite it or not. Comparative advertising is legal, and often useful, but it has to be accurate at the time it runs. Premium claims invite questions about what the premium consists of. "Free" has a meaning. "Australian owned" has a meaning. Health, environment and country-of-origin claims have regimes attached. A positioning that depends on a word the lawyer will later strike is a positioning you have not finished. Write with the strike-through already in mind.

Trade marks are not a positioning. IP Australia will register a distinctive sign. It will not save a vague sentence. Teams regularly confuse the two, and then spend a year arguing about a lock-up while the offer stays interchangeable. Register the name. Write the constraint separately. If you need a new name because the old one cannot carry the claim, that is a different project, and it has implications for a listed company that go well beyond a design system.

State and Commonwealth procurement will also read your sentence, even if you think you are a consumer brand. Government buyers write tenders that ask for values alignment, Indigenous participation, carbon reporting and "customer-centric" delivery. If your public positioning and your tender language describe two different organisations, the people who do the work will notice. They will deliver the tender. The advertising will become a residual.

How to draft it without a two-day offsite

You can draft a constraining positioning in a week if you already know the business. Most teams do. They are afraid of writing it down.

Start with the last twelve months of work that caused an argument. The packaging that sales hated. The campaign legal rewrote. The SKU finance killed. The partnership the CEO loved and the stores could not explain. Those arguments are the positioning trying to be born. Write the rule that would have settled each one, then see whether the rules are the same rule. If they are not, you have an architecture problem or a category problem, not a wording problem.

Sit in a store, a branch, a call-centre floor or a campus service desk for a morning. Write down the promises staff already make when they are trying to be helpful. Those promises are the de facto brand. If they contradict the workshop sentence, the workshop sentence will lose. Either change the operations or change the sentence. Do not publish a third thing called culture.

Read the annual report and the complaints. The annual report tells you what the company has already promised investors. The complaints tell you where customers thought a promise existed. A positioning that fights the annual report will be orphaned at the first results briefing. A positioning that ignores the complaints will be rewritten by social media, which is a terrible brand committee.

Then write the forbidden list before you write the line. It feels backwards and it is the only order that works. Once you know what you will not do, the claim gets cheaper to phrase. You are no longer trying to sound like every capable competitor. You are describing the shape of your refusals.

Show the draft to the three users. Not in a playback with music. In a corridor, with the sentence on a page and one idea you are prepared to kill. If they can use it, lock it. Date it. Put it on a page that is allowed to be ugly. Ugly pages get read. Beautiful brand portals do not.

Keep it short enough to remember and specific enough to bruise

The sentence should be speakable. If a store manager cannot repeat it without looking at a phone, it will not constrain a shift. That does not mean it should be a slogan. Slogans are for customers. Positioning is for people who allocate money, risk and time. The customer-facing line can be shorter and warmer. It must not contradict the constraint.

Avoid the imported templates that treat positioning as a canvas with a handful of boxes. They are useful as a checklist after you have a draft. They are fatal as a substitute for judgement. Filling boxes is how you get "for people who want more from their money" and other lines that have never killed a media booking.

Avoid purpose inflation. Purpose has a job when the organisation is deciding a political or environmental trade-off that advertising cannot settle. It is a poor substitute for a market claim. Australian customers have heard a decade of purposes. They have also watched the ACCC take action when the purpose and the conduct diverged. If you cannot fund the purpose, do not print it.

Avoid committee English. "Enabling Australians to thrive" is what a sentence looks like after six stakeholders have removed the verbs that might exclude someone. Exclusion is the work. A brand that stands for a defined choice has to disappoint the other choices. The disappointment should be deliberate, cheap, and written down.

What to do with the thing once you have it

Use it as a gate, not a poster. Every brief should open with the claim, the proof and the forbidden moves. Every agency response should be scored against those before anyone talks about craft. If you need a reminder of how that scoring looks in practice, the practice of briefing is more useful than another framework. Writers who have killed a live idea with a sentence can bring that argument to the guest desk.

Use it in range reviews. The question is not whether a SKU could sell. The question is whether the SKU trains the customer to expect a brand you have decided not to be. Private label is where this gets uncomfortable for Australian retailers. Own brand can support a value claim or destroy a quality claim. It cannot do both on the same bay without a very clear architecture.

Use it when a challenger story walks into the room. Category rhetoric is a way of avoiding a position. Sometimes you should pick a fight. Sometimes you should be the second cola and harvest a defined minority. The positioning is what tells you which day it is.

Review it when the proof changes. A new fulfilment promise, a merger, a store-closure program, a regulator's enforceable undertaking: these can make a true sentence false. Do not wait for the next brand refresh. A positioning is an operating document. When the operations move, the document moves, or it becomes fiction.

The test remains ugly and sufficient. Take the next idea the organisation is excited about. Read the sentence. If nothing dies, you are not positioned. You are decorated. Write until something you like has to stop.