Most businesses aren't forgettable by accident

If your positioning could be swapped with any competitor's without anyone noticing, that's not a branding problem. It's a strategy problem.

That was the opening of our most recent Gray Matters masterclass, delivered by Storm Mackay, founder of Soba: Private Label. Storm works exclusively on market positioning and go-to-market messaging. Nothing else. A deliberate choice, and one that makes the point for them.

What followed was a session on why so many businesses sound identical, and what it takes to carve out a position that means something.

Your market position is two things, not one

Storm opened with a distinction worth sitting with. Your market position has two parts: where you sit relative to competitors, and the space you occupy in the mind of your buyer.

The first is about white space. Work out what everyone else is doing so you can deliberately choose not to do the same. The second is psychological. When your buyer has a problem, do they think of you? If not, why not?

Storm used Coca-Cola and Pepsi to make the point. Pepsi spends a lot of energy talking about Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola never mentions Pepsi. One brand occupies minds. The other is playing catch-up.

The takeaway isn't to copy either. Mind share is built deliberately, and chasing a bigger competitor head-to-head without the budget to match them is a losing game.

The research is blunt

Soba ran a study called the B2B Echo Chamber report, sampling over 1,000 professional services companies listed on Companies House. The finding: you can't tell any of them apart.

The most common words in homepage headlines were 'business', 'services', and 'legal'. More than half of those companies didn't address the reader at all. The ratio of 'we' to 'you' language across the sample was roughly one to one. It should be closer to three mentions of the buyer for every one about yourself.

Storm's read: most of these companies are surviving on referrals. No one has had to think hard about differentiation. That works, until it doesn't.

Your differentiator is usually already visible

The most useful point Storm made was about where to look for your point of difference. It's normally the thing people already come to you for. Not the full range of what you offer. The one or two things that cause someone to pick up the phone to you rather than someone else.

'Award-winning' and 'expert' don't count. Those are table stakes. The real work is peeling back to what's genuinely distinctive, and being specific enough about your niche that the positioning has something real to build on.

Storm was direct on the niche question. 'Accountants' is a category, not a niche. 'Accountants with ten employees, turning over £100m, working in manufacturing' is a niche. The more specific you get, the more defensible your position becomes.

Find the line that splits the room

Once you have a positioning statement, Storm's advice is to take three versions into a focus group and find the one that divides opinion. Not the one everyone likes. The one that generates a proper argument.

No successful company is for everyone. If your positioning generates a lukewarm 'yes, that seems fine' from everyone in the room, it doesn't mean anything. A strong position will put some people off. That's the point.

Standing out is a commitment, not a campaign

The thread running through the session was consistency, and how rarely businesses commit to it. Most companies pull things from the market before they've had time to land. You will get bored of your brand long before your audience has even noticed it.

Storm referenced the principle of spending roughly 20% of your budget on immediate-return activity and 80% on long-term brand building. Positioning sits in that 80%. It's not a one-off project. It's an ongoing posture.

Emotion matters. People buy emotionally and justify rationally, in B2B just as much as in consumer markets. The time horizon is longer, the mechanism is the same. The IBM line 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' endured for decades because it spoke to what buyers were actually anxious about. That kind of insight doesn't come from a copywriter. It comes from doing the strategic work first.

Worth sitting with

What made this session useful wasn't a new set of tactics. It was a reminder that positioning is one of those things almost every business thinks it has sorted, and very few actually do. The research backs that up.

If the honest answer to 'what makes you different?' is still a little murky, that's where the real work starts. It's not a messaging problem or a website problem. It's a strategy problem. Worth treating like one.

Sessions like this are where a lot of that thinking begins. Working through these questions alongside other people, with proper challenge and conversation, tends to get further than going it alone.

If you'd like to be part of the next one, we run regular masterclasses and events with people who think seriously about growth. Find out what's coming up at gray-matters.co/training-and-events.

You can connect or follow Storm Mackay on LinkedIn and find out more about Soba Private Label.