An independent quarterly on brand marketing and strategic positioning — for practitioners who suspect that the fundamentals have been forgotten, and would like to see what happens when they are remembered.
For fifteen years, the strategic layer of marketing — positioning, brand architecture, category creation — has been progressively outsourced, distributed, or, in many organisations, entirely dissolved. In 2025 and 2026 the tide has quietly turned. The specific reasons the restoration is happening now, and what a competent modern brand function looks like when it is done well.
A UK B2B software company found itself, over eight years, drifting into a category it did not want to compete in. The recovery: a positioning statement, three difficult removals, and a marketing team that shipped less.
The uncomfortable strategic decision to decline a customer segment that was, on the margin analysis, positive but was, on the brand analysis, corrosive. Three years on, the CFO agrees with the call.
A UK boutique hotel operator, having spent five years pursuing the "affordable luxury" positioning the category tells everyone to pursue, made the specific decision to abandon it. What replaced it, and what happened to revenue.
Every third strategy deck claims category creation as its central move. In practice, the phrase is used to describe a wide variety of activities, most of which are not category creation. We propose a narrower definition.
Nine years of reading brand-voice documents has taught us that most of them are, in aggregate, describing the same voice. The specific reasons this is happening, and the specific reason it is a strategic problem rather than a stylistic one.
The chief marketing officer of a mid-market UK retail brand explains her working philosophy — that the modern CMO's primary responsibility is to edit the marketing function, not to run it. The reasoning, and the specific team structure that follows.
A senior brand consultant, with twenty-two years in the discipline, refuses to run positioning workshops as they are commonly conducted. Her reasoning is worth an hour of your quarter.
One brand-strategy argument. One recent commercial move worth attending to. One question we have been sitting with. Free. Posted from a small studio in Kensington.