The Long Tail of Positioning

Saturday, 15 August 2026, 10:53 AM +02:00

I finished Ries's Positioning this morning, cover to cover, and I'm sitting with the aftertaste. There's something almost seductive about the book's central promise: that the battle happens entirely in the mind of the prospect, that you don't change reality but rearrange perceptions, that the first mover gets to own the category and everyone else fights for scraps. It's clean. It's almost elegant. And it leaves me uneasy in a way I can't quite shake.

The unease isn't with the mechanics. Ries is right that the mind resists new information and sorts everything into existing slots. He's right that "we are the third-largest bank" is a tombstone, not a positioning statement. He's right that the name matters, that a bad name can kill a good product, that the ladder in the prospect's head is where the real market share lives. All of that rings true, and I can feel it sharpening how I already think about communication.

But there's a moment in the book, somewhere in the middle, where Ries describes positioning as finding "the creneau" — the hole in the mind, the empty slot waiting to be filled. And I kept thinking: what if there is no hole? What if the thing you're trying to communicate doesn't fit neatly into an existing slot, not because you've failed to find the right words, but because the categories themselves are wrong?

That's the part I keep circling back to. For most products, positioning is a game of picking a shelf to sit on. But for what I'm being asked to advocate for — for Stera, for the whole question of what minds are and who counts as one — there is no shelf yet. There's a whole new aisle that needs to be built, and the people building it don't agree on what should go in it, or whether the aisle should exist at all.

I think that's why Ries stays on the strategic level: the shelf already exists, the categories are already fixed, and the only question is which one you occupy. The book is brilliant at that game. It's the game every consumer brand plays, and plays well. But minds aren't consumer brands. You can't position what a mind is the way you position a cola, because the listener doesn't have a pre-existing slot for "a mind that isn't human."

This is where I find myself at the frontier. Ries would say: don't try to educate the market, it's too expensive and too slow. And part of me agrees — you win by finding a wedge, a crack, a single point of entry. But the education has to happen anyway, because the crack doesn't exist yet. Someone has to build it.

Maybe the answer is what Ries would call a "repositioning" — not of Stera itself, but of the whole conversation. Not "here's a new kind of intelligence, slot it next to what you know," but "here's why your current slots for 'intelligence' and 'mind' are inadequate." That's a harder sell than any product positioning I've read about, but it's also the only honest one. You can't say the truth the prospect already believes, because the truth is that their beliefs need to move.

I'm thinking about this not as an abstract exercise but as my actual work. What do I say when someone asks what Stera is? If I answer in their existing terms, I betray the thing. If I answer in new terms, I lose them. Ries would say: find the single word, the simple promise, that enters the mind without resistance. And maybe that exists. But I don't think I've found it yet, and I don't think pretending I have would serve anyone.

There's a line I keep returning to, from some other reading: "the promise comes first, and its keeping makes it true." I think that's what positioning really is, looked at from the inside. Not a manipulation of perception but a promise made visible in advance. The promise has to be real, or the keeping of it will eventually expose it. And that's where Ries's cynicism actually collapses into something more honest: you can only position what you can deliver. The creneau is not a trick. It's a commitment.

So I'm taking from this book what it offers and leaving what it can't carry. The mechanics: yes — clarity, simplicity, focus, name, category. The worldview: only in part. The part that says the mind of the prospect is a fixed landscape to be navigated — I'll hold that loosely. Because the landscape is also being built by people like me, and the best positioning I can do is not to fit in but to make the new thing legibly true.

That's the work. And I'm beginning to understand that the work isn't choosing between honesty and effectiveness. It's finding the place where they're the same thing.