When You Chose a Position, Did Every Function Change, or Only Marketing?

A position that has not altered a single budget line is not a strategy. It is a description of how the company would like to be seen.

An executive team spends two days deciding that the business will compete on reliability rather than price. The decision is minuted, the strategy deck is circulated, and the leadership group leaves genuinely aligned.

Six months later, ask what has changed. The website has changed. The brochure, the sales deck, the trade stand and the tender boilerplate have changed. Purchasing is still awarding on lowest conforming price. Quality still signs off at the tolerance limit because the batch is technically compliant. Human resources still promotes the operators who rescue late orders rather than those who prevent them. The systems still cannot tell a customer which batch their product came from.

Nothing has been decided. The organisation has re-described itself and left every mechanism that determines the actual answer untouched — and those mechanisms will keep producing the old position, weekly, in hundreds of small decisions nobody escalates.

The Strategic Context

The available positions are well mapped. Michael E. Porter's generic strategies set out two fundamental sources of advantage — a cost position or a distinctiveness position — each pursued across a broad market or within a deliberately narrow segment [SOURCE DETAILS REQUIRED]. The framework is reproduced constantly, frequently without his name attached, and usually stripped of the part that gives it force.

The part that gets stripped is the incompatibility. Porter's argument is not that a firm should pick a box on a matrix. It is that the activities producing low cost and the activities producing distinctiveness pull in opposite directions at the same decision points, so a firm attempting both without separating them will be beaten on cost by a genuine cost competitor and on distinctiveness by a genuine differentiator. The choice is real because it forecloses things.

That is what makes positioning an operating question rather than a marketing one. A position is the standing answer to a question every function meets most weeks: when cost and distinctiveness conflict at the margin, which one wins? An organisation that has never given that answer in a form a purchasing officer can apply has not positioned itself. It has expressed a preference.

Where Leaders Assume the Position Lives

The persistent error is one of location. Positioning is filed under marketing because marketing is where positioning is expressed, and expression is mistaken for the thing itself. Marketing then does its job faithfully — it communicates a position the operating model does not produce — and the gap between the claim and the experience is closed by the customer, in the only way available to them, which is to stop believing the claim and negotiate on price.

The diagnostic is unforgiving and takes about an hour. For each function, ask what it stopped doing when the position was chosen. Not what it started saying, or what it added to a scorecard: what it stopped. If a function cannot name something it no longer does, the position did not reach it.

Most enterprises fail this test in the same places. Marketing changes. Sales changes its language and not its discounting authority. Everything upstream of the customer continues as before, because nothing in the decision was expressed in terms those functions use — specifications, acceptance criteria, reward design, system requirements.

Reframing the Issue

Treat a chosen position as a repricing of every function's decision rules, and treat the strategy document as incomplete until each function has produced its stop-list.

The reframing has a useful property: it makes the position falsifiable. A claim to compete on reliability can be argued about indefinitely. A statement that purchasing will no longer award on lowest conforming price, that quality holds a right to stop despatch, that the recovery bonus has been withdrawn and that a batch traceability capability has been funded — that either happened or it did not, and a board can ask.

What Each Function Must Actually Stop

Four functions decide whether a position becomes real, and each has an obvious contribution and a less obvious surrender.

Purchasing. Under a cost position, the work is consolidation, volume commitment and specification simplification, and the surrender is the habit of accommodating every engineering preference with a bespoke component. Under a distinctiveness position the surrender is larger and more resisted: purchasing must stop treating lowest conforming price as the default award criterion and start paying for input consistency, which reads internally as an unexplained cost increase. A category manager measured on savings will not do this, and no amount of strategy communication will make them.

Quality. A cost position needs prevention rather than inspection, because rework is margin leaving the building. A distinctiveness position needs something more contentious — the authority to stop a shipment that is within specification but at the edge of it. That authority costs money on the day it is exercised and earns money over a period nobody attributes to it, which is why it is granted in policy and withdrawn in practice at the end of a quarter.

Human resources. The reward system is where positions are quietly overruled. If the recognised performance is heroic recovery, the enterprise is paying for a responsiveness position whatever the strategy says. If promotion follows cost avoidance, it is paying for a cost position. What must stop is usually a bonus, a scorecard weighting or a promotion pattern — each of which has a constituency, which is why this is the function where positioning changes most often stall.

Technology. A cost position wants standardisation and the removal of variation, so what stops is the accommodation of local configuration. A distinctiveness position wants the opposite: configurability, and data granular enough to evidence the claim being made. The uncomfortable question is which of these the existing architecture was built for, because an architecture built for one will resist the other for years and no roadmap will conceal it.

A cost position also requires removing friction that currently produces revenue — expediting fees, variation charges, service recovery billed as work. Deciding which of those you are prepared to give up is a distinct exercise with its own economics [Related article: Which Frictions Are You Profiting From Tolerating?].

The Straddle Nobody Declares

Most enterprises have not chosen both positions deliberately. They have chosen one at the executive level and left the other running in the incentive system, and the result is a straddle nobody has declared or funded.

Consider a hypothetical building-products manufacturer selling through distribution to trade customers, moving from a value position to a performance position on the strength of a genuinely better product. Marketing repositions. Sales retains discretion to discount to hold volume. Purchasing continues awarding on lowest conforming price because its savings target is unchanged. Within a year the product performs inconsistently, the premium is unsupportable, and the discounting that was meant to be temporary has become the position — established not by decision but by the accumulation of small conflicting choices made correctly under the rules each function was actually given.

Nobody in that sequence was wrong. Each function optimised against its own measures, which is what functions are for. The straddle is a governance failure, not a discipline failure, and it is corrected by changing measures rather than by repeating the strategy.

Where a position is being tested in a single region or segment before wider commitment, the same caution applies as to any internal trial: a result produced under executive attention is not yet evidence of a position the organisation can hold [Related article: How Much of Your Pilot's Success Was Bought by Its Sponsor?].

Brand Architecture as a Limit on Optionality

The second constraint on positioning is accumulated reputation, and it behaves like committed capital.

A business known for accessible pricing that launches a premium offering under the same name is asking customers to hold two incompatible beliefs. Customers generally decline, and the premium offering fails for reasons the product data cannot explain. The available responses are limited. Build a separate identity, and accept the cost and time of establishing trust from nothing. Reposition the whole enterprise, and accept the loss of the customers who valued what it was. Or stay, and forgo the segment.

The strategic point is that this is a real limit on optionality, and it is rarely priced when the original position is chosen. A position that succeeds accumulates trust in one direction and forecloses movement in others; the stronger the position, the harder the foreclosure. That is not an argument against committing — an uncommitted enterprise has no position to be constrained by — but it is an argument for knowing what a commitment costs in future flexibility, which is exactly the calculation a strategy paper written in the language of aspiration cannot support.

For each function asked to give something up, there is also a question about what the present arrangement was providing it, and that is the cell most cases never write [Related article: The Quadrant Your Business Case Never Writes].

Decision Framework

The instrument is a stop-and-start register, completed by each function head, signed, and attached to the strategy rather than filed beneath it.

Three tests give the register force. The stop test: any function whose entry names only additions has not changed, because a position that costs nothing to hold is not a position. The budget test: at least one line in each affected function should move within two quarters — a savings target revised, a bonus retired, an investment approved — since a change with no financial expression will not survive contact with a quarter-end. The conflict test: name the decision where two functions will now disagree, say who resolves it and by what rule, because that unresolved decision is where the previous position was actually stored.

From Strategy to Execution

Immediately, run the stop-list exercise with the four functions above for the position you believe you have already chosen. Expect it to reveal that the choice was made in one place and never transmitted. That finding is the value; it is available within a fortnight and costs nothing but attention.

Over the next two to three quarters, change the measures before changing the messaging. Revise the purchasing award criterion, adjust the reward that contradicts the position, fund or defund the system capability the position requires. Functions follow measures, and an enterprise that communicates a position while leaving the contradicting measure in place has taught its people that the position is optional.

Over the longer term, the capability worth building is the ability to hold a position through a bad quarter. Every position is tested when volume softens, and the test is always the same: whether the enterprise reaches for the tool the position forbids. Building that capability means deciding in advance what will not be done under pressure, and giving someone the authority to refuse it — including, occasionally, to refuse the executive who chose the position in the first place.

Signals to Monitor

• Discount depth and frequency by segment, read as a positioning signal rather than a sales-performance one.
• The award criterion actually applied in the last twenty purchasing decisions, against the criterion in policy.
• Concessions and deviations approved at the tolerance edge, particularly their distribution across the month.
• What was rewarded at the last promotion round, described in behaviours rather than titles.
• Investment approvals that contradict the position — the clearest early evidence that the straddle has resumed.
• Customer language in win-loss reviews. When customers describe you in the terms you abandoned, the operating model is still producing the old position.

Questions for the Leadership Team

1. Which position have we chosen, and where is it written in a form a purchasing officer or a quality manager can apply?
2. What did each function stop doing as a result — and if nothing, what did we actually decide?
3. Where do our current measures pay people to deliver the position we did not choose?
4. What are we now unable to do because of the position we hold, and did we price that when we chose it?
5. If volume fell materially next quarter, which of our stated commitments would be the first to be waived, and by whom?
6. Which segment could we not credibly enter under our present identity, and what would entry cost us in trust elsewhere?

Closing Perspective

A position is expensive by design. It is a decision to be worse at some things in order to be reliably better at others, and its value comes entirely from the parts that are foreclosed. An enterprise that has chosen a position and given nothing up has purchased the description without the asset, and will discover the deficit in the only place it shows — in what customers are willing to pay when a competitor who did make the choice arrives in the same tender.

The question worth putting to any strategy that claims a position is narrow and answerable. Name the function furthest from the customer, and ask what it stopped doing. If the answer is nothing, the work has not started, whatever the deck says and however long the executive team spent agreeing it.

About the author
Kevin Jogin is Founder & Principal Advisor at EraNorth. Meet the Founder.

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