Listen to Your Customers, Not Your Competitors – Joel Spolsky

Here’s what separates good marketing leaders from great ones: they think in positioning.

Not campaigns. Not channels. Not even tactics.

Positioning!!

It’s the difference between a leader who asks, “Should we run ads on LinkedIn this quarter?” and one who asks, “What unique role should we own in our market? What do we want to be known for? How do we make that inevitable?”

Let me walk you through how this works.

The Positioning-First Mindset

A strong marketing leader doesn’t start with what their company does. They start with what they want to own in the buyer’s mind.

They ask questions like:

What problem does our audience struggle with that nobody is solving well?

What do we have (expertise, data, infrastructure) that competitors don’t?

What single word or phrase describes our unique value?

Once they answer these, everything else follows. Content strategy, channel strategy, messaging, hiring, partnerships—all support that central positioning.

The Fintech Marketing Leader

In general most marketing leaders prioritise listening to customers over rushing to conclusion and random judgements. 

Meet Sarah. She’s VP of Marketing at a mid-market fintech solving payment reconciliation for mid-market SaaS companies.

When Sarah started, the temptation was obvious: build a generic lead gen machine. Run PPC. Pump out blogs. Push webinars. Hire contractors to produce content fast.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she spent three weeks interviewing customers. Talked to five competitors. Read industry reports. And identified the insight: finance teams at SaaS companies aren’t worried about missing a payment. They’re worried about wasting time on reconciliation instead of strategy.

That became her positioning: “The platform that gives finance teams their time back.”

Everything flowed from that. Content wasn’t about payment features. It was about the business impact of automation. Case studies highlighted time savings, not technical specs. Every vendor conversation started with: “How much time are your finance teams losing to manual processes?”

The result? Positioning alignment meant buyers self-selected. People who cared about features went elsewhere. People who valued time and efficiency became ideal customers.

The B2B SaaS Thought Leader

Meet Alex. He’s marketing director at an industrial automation startup. Competitors outnumber them three-to-one. Nobody knows who they are.

Alex could compete on price. Build a big sales team. Chase generic “manufacturing efficiency” positioning.

Instead, he identified an obsession: supply chain visibility for discrete manufacturers. Not sexy. But his CEO’s background was supply-chain. His founding engineer spent 15 years solving visibility. The company’s first customers came through supply chain introductions.

Alex positioned them as: “The supply chain visibility company for manufacturers.” Not “automation solutions.” Not “manufacturing software.” Visibility. For manufacturers.

That positioning meant everything: Alex funded research on supply chain trends. Customer interviews were with supply chain leaders. The LinkedIn community was supply-chain professionals. Vendor outreach was supply-chain networks.

Three years in, they own supply chain visibility in a way bigger competitors can’t. Why? Every move reinforced positioning.

Positioning Creates a Flywheel

Here’s why great marketing leaders obsess over positioning : When positioning is clear, your content strategy becomes obvious.

When content is intentional, it attracts right buyers. When right buyers hear from you consistently, they trust you as the expert. Trust compounds into brand authority. Break the chain allow positioning to drift and everything suffers. Content gets generic. Messaging scatters. Buyers see you as one option among many instead of the obvious choice.

Positioning and AI-Led Marketing: Why Positioning Matters More Now

Here’s where it gets interesting. AI is now fundamental to content creation, analysis, and customer interaction. And this changes everything about positioning.

When AI handles tactical content generation, human judgment about positioning becomes more valuable. A marketing leader’s job isn’t to write 20 blog posts. It’s to define the narrative territory your brand owns. It’s to ensure AI doesn’t accidentally produce content that contradicts or dilutes positioning.

Think about it: AI can generate 100 variations of copy. But it can’t invent positioning. It can optimize for keywords. But it can’t decide what unique value your market should know you for. That’s human strategy.

The best marketing leaders using AI right now do something specific. They front-load positioning clarity. They define: What is our unique selling territory? What are the three things we never want to be known for? What’s the narrative we’re building?

Then they use AI as a force multiplier. AI fills in examples. AI scales content production. AI maintains consistency across channels. But positioning is your North Star and stays human.

Companies that skip positioning and jump to AI-generated content end up with voluminous, generic, forgettable material. Ones that nail positioning first and layer AI on top? They become thought leaders.