"And" Is the Enemy
Every weak positioning statement contains the word "and."
We're premium and accessible. We're innovative and reliable. We're for enterprises and small businesses. We're experts and generalists.
This isn't strategic thinking. It's conflict avoidance. When a brand tries to be two opposing things, it's usually because someone in the room had enough political capital to avoid being told no. The result is a positioning that looks like a compromise because it is one.
Strategy is not consensus. It's a series of hard choices that force trade-offs. If your positioning doesn't exclude something meaningful, you haven't positioned anything.
The Fantasy of "Both"
The desire to have it both ways is understandable. Markets reward scale. Leadership wants growth. Investors want expansion. If you can be premium and affordable, you capture more of the market. If you can serve enterprises and startups, you have more opportunities.
The problem is that being two things requires two business models. Two sales approaches. Two product roadmaps. Two marketing strategies. Two operational realities. Most brands don't have the resources to do one of these well, let alone two simultaneously.
What actually happens: the brand does neither well. It's not premium enough to command premium pricing. It's not accessible enough to win on price. It confuses both audiences and satisfies neither. The brand becomes stuck in a liminal space between two positions, unable to execute either with the commitment required to win.
You cannot be both. You can only be one, or you can be mediocre at both. The market does not reward mediocrity at scale.
Why "And" Feels Safe
Including "and" in your positioning feels like smart business. It looks like strategic flexibility. It sounds like you're not leaving money on the table. It suggests you understand market complexity.
What it actually signals: you're afraid to choose. You're unwilling to defend a point of view. You'd rather be vague and inoffensive than clear and polarizing. You want to win without competing.
The comfort of "and" is that it delays the hard decision. It pushes conflict into the future, where it will express itself as poor execution, confused customers, and mediocre results. By then, the people who made the decision will have moved on or the blame will be diffuse enough to avoid.
This is not strategy. It's institutional cowardice.
What Strategic Clarity Actually Requires
A real positioning decision means choosing one thing and accepting everything that comes with that choice. This includes the parts you don't like.
If you position as premium:
Your volume will be lower
Some customers won't be able to afford you
You'll need to justify the price constantly
Your brand needs to perform at the premium standard every time
If you position as accessible:
Your margins will be thinner
You'll need operational efficiency
Some customers will question your quality
You'll compete with others doing the same thing
Neither of these is comfortable. Both come with real constraints. The point is not to avoid the constraints. The point is to choose which constraints you're willing to accept and build a business model that works within them.
The Discipline of "Or"
Successful positioning is built on "or." You're this or that. Not both. The entire strategy flows from this choice.
This requires discipline at every level:
Product development: what features do we build, what do we ignore
Pricing: what does our price signal about our position
Marketing: what language and channels match our choice
Sales: what customers do we pursue, what do we decline
Partnerships: what associations reinforce our position, what dilute it
If your positioning contains "and," you haven't done the hard work yet. You've documented the political stalemate and called it strategy.
The Test
Here's how you know if your positioning is real:
Can you name three types of customers or opportunities you've explicitly decided not to pursue? If not, you haven't positioned. You've just described yourself in generous terms and hoped the market will figure it out.
Real positioning creates constraints. It makes some decisions easy because they're clearly out of bounds. It makes some opportunities irrelevant because they don't fit. It makes the organization uncomfortable because it forces prioritization.
If your positioning doesn't make someone in the organization uncomfortable, it's not positioning. It's a permission structure to keep doing what you're already doing.
What This Means for You
Most brands will continue to use "and" because the alternative requires leadership to take a position and defend it. It requires accepting that growth might come from depth rather than breadth. It requires believing that being something specific is more valuable than being broadly acceptable.
This is a harder sell internally than "we can have both." It requires explaining why limiting the opportunity set actually increases the odds of winning. It requires patience while the market understands what you stand for.
Most won't do it. They'll keep hedging. They'll keep trying to serve everyone. They'll keep wondering why their marketing doesn't work and their competitors are eating their lunch.
The opportunity is not to convince them. The opportunity is to choose differently and capture the ground they're too afraid to claim.
Strategy is not additive. It's subtractive. Every "and" you remove makes your positioning stronger. Every "or" you commit to makes your execution clearer.
The question is whether you have the conviction to choose.