Most businesses treat brand positioning as something to write: what they want to say. We start somewhere different: with what someone would actually say about you if they were a little drunk and being honest. That sentence already exists. It lives somewhere in how your real clients talk about you when you're not in the room. So our job in this stage is to find it before we build anything on top of it.
First, we ask the questions most agencies skip, because the answers make the next four stages harder to charge for. For example, who are your best clients, and what do they actually say? What problem do you solve that nobody else is naming clearly? What would you lose if you got everything you said you wanted? The Conceptualisation stage is an investigation, not a briefing form. In other words, we're looking for the gap between the pitch you've rehearsed and the truth underneath it.
The assumption that positioning is something you invent. It isn't. Invented positioning sounds like everyone else's invented positioning, which is how the sameness problem starts. Real brand positioning is uncovered, not created. So this stage exists to do that uncovering before anything else gets in the way.
One sentence. Clear enough for people to repeat without you in the room. And specific enough that it couldn't belong to any other business in your category. Everything else in the Method builds on this sentence.
That specificity matters because distinctive brands are easier to recall when someone needs what you do, which is the whole point of being recommended. If you want to try the method yourself first, our article on finding your positioning statement walks through the questions we ask.
It's paid, on purpose. The moment we stop charging for our time is the moment we start attracting people who don't value theirs either. You'll walk away with insight and a clear next step either way, whether we ever work together again or not.