Michel Fortin

Tag: Positioning Strategy

Four-person leadership team mapping Power Positioning as an operating system on a glass wall, with positioning at the center connecting to marketing, sales, product, hiring, and retention functions during a strategy diagnosis.

Why Positioning Is an Operating System (Not a Tagline)

by Michel Fortin

Most positioning conversations happen in the wrong department. Positioning arrives as a marketing brief and leaves as a tagline. Between those events, three or four rooms of smart people generate an artifact everyone nods at, and nothing about the business actually changes. That is positioning-as-tagline. Power Positioning treats positioning as the operating system underneath every function. Marketing, sales, product, and hiring all read from the same instruction set. Here is what changes when they do.

Read More
A senior executive sits at a leather-bound journal on a dark wood desk, examining a freshly written coined term under the warm glow of a brass lamp in a premium office at late afternoon. The image illustrates the article's argument that brandifying, the act of naming a category into existence, is a different move from branding what already exists.

Why I Brandify Categories Instead of Branding Products

by Michel Fortin

Most people use ‘branding’ and ‘brandifying’ as if they were the same word. They are not. Branding decorates what already exists. Brandifying names the thing into existence first, so it can be owned. I have been doing the second one for 35 years without a word for it. Here is the line, the move, and why expert-led firms that want to claim a category have to learn to brandify rather than brand.

Read More