TL;DR Positioning a model writes in seconds still has to move a buyer towards preferred-partner status. The test to apply before the line ships is whether a competitor could truthfully say the same thing.
- Positioning has no clean ground truth, so a plausible line and a useful one look identical on the page. The test is whether a competitor could truthfully say the same thing.
- In B2B, the goal of positioning is to become the partner a client prefers across several services, and a line is judged on whether it moves a buyer closer to that.
- A useful line says something about the relationship and the experience of working with the firm, and makes a claim rivals cannot truthfully make.
- B2B decisions are made by a group, take months, and depend on a short list of approved vendors, so positioning written for a single consumer buyer misses them.
- A model's positioning output can be trusted only when the competitor-claim test is written into the brief itself.
Part 3 of Marketing in the Age of AI. Start with part 1, the marketing value chain, or the series overview.
Ask any model for B2B positioning and you get something that reads well: "the innovative, trusted partner for enterprise X, delivering transformative outcomes." The line is fluent and impossible to argue with. That is the problem. Positioning has no ground truth to check against. Nothing flags a hollow sentence, so a plausible one and a useful one read the same on the page.
The model will write positioning for you in seconds, so the valuable skill is judging it: knowing whether the line you were handed would move a buyer. That takes an account of how B2B buyers choose, and one test this article applies to any positioning a model produces: whether a competitor could truthfully make the same claim.
The goal of B2B positioning
Start with what positioning is for. In B2B, the funnel-to-purchase model fits poorly. The commercial goal is to become the partner a client prefers across several services. Being top of mind with buyers is the most important factor, and the strength of the client relationship is the second. A piece of positioning is judged on whether it moves a buyer closer to preferring you. A clever line that leaves the buyer where they started has done nothing.
Relationship, client experience and distinctiveness
B2B buyers care about the relationship with a firm, about client experience, meaning how it feels to work with you day to day, and about distinctiveness, meaning a capability your rivals cannot truthfully claim. Finding a claim rivals cannot make often starts with mapping the unclaimed demand in your category, the needs buyers keep raising that no competitor has claimed.
Take the positioning a model has handed you and check it against those three. Distinctiveness is the one a line can show directly: whether it makes a claim rivals cannot make. For relationship and client experience, check whether the line says anything about how the firm works with clients. A line that offers awareness and a well-turned phrase offers none of the three. "Innovative, trusted partner" fails the test: every competitor claims the same thing, so it has no distinctiveness and says nothing about how the firm works with clients.
Designing for B2B buyers
Most AI-generated positioning assumes a consumer world: one buyer, a short path, a clean line from ad to purchase. B2B works nothing like that, and the differences below explain where this kind of positioning fails.
Decisions are made by a group. A single deal passes through several people: the user who works with the service every day, the champion who pushes for it internally, the decision-maker who signs, the financial buyer who guards the budget, and the technical influencer who can veto on one objection. Positioning that addresses only one of them gives the others nothing. Ask a model to name each stakeholder and address each one; the exercise shows how much of its first draft was written for one stakeholder only.
The lag is long. There's a wide gap between the moment a buyer first hears of you, the moment they consider you, and the moment they buy. Attribution will not be neat or linear, and an immediate response is the wrong measure of positioning. Its job is to build preference before the purchase, so the effect on revenue comes later.
The shortlist is tiny and gated. In B2B, the consideration set is short and constrained by approved-vendor lists and existing contracts. Getting onto the list is the decisive step. Positioning that assumes an open choice is aimed at the wrong stage; the stage that matters is being one of the few names on the list at all.
Incumbency masks fading preference. Contracts and switching costs keep clients in place well past the point where they'd actively choose you again. Repeat purchase is therefore a weak measure. A better one is whether a client would choose you again if the contract were open, and, for buyers you do not yet serve, how open they are to switching to you. Positioning should be built to earn that openness.
Softer criteria count. B2B buyers will tell you they decide on value, ROI and track record, and those criteria are what gets a vendor considered at all. How it feels to work with the vendor also counts. These are people whose own standing depends on the people they choose, and positioning that ignores this competes on features alone.
Writing the test into the prompt
Written into the brief, those three and the competitor test give the model a standard to check its own draft against. A brief along these lines:
Position this B2B offer on the relationship, distinctiveness (a capability rivals cannot truthfully claim), and client experience. Treat a generic tagline as a failing answer. State the ideal customer profile and name each buying stakeholder. Give me the one distinctive claim and the proof behind it, then check whether a competitor could truthfully say the same thing. If they could, the claim is not positioning yet, so try again.
That last check does the most work, and the model won't run it on itself unless you tell it to.
Judging model outputs
AI has made producing marketing artefacts almost free, which moves the value to evaluating them. A model will write you as many confident positioning statements as you ask for. Picking the one that would move a buyer from the others that only sound like it takes domain judgement, and that judgement is the subject of the next part of the series.
Further reading
- Continue with part 4: the evaluation function