Most companies believe they have positioning. They have a tagline, a mission statement, maybe a brand deck from a few years ago. The question is whether any of it lives in the heads of the people who talk to customers every day. There’s a quick way to find out.
The test
Pick any three people in your company. Not the founder, and not whoever wrote the brand deck. Ask each of them, separately:
- What does our company do?
- Who do we do it for?
- What problem do we solve better than anyone else?
- Why should a customer choose us over the alternatives?
Then compare the answers. That’s the Any-Three-People Test.
If three people give you three different answers, you don’t have positioning yet. You have three positionings, and your customers are hearing all of them.
Why it matters
Positioning is the foundation every other marketing decision rests on. When it’s unclear, the symptoms show up everywhere: sales reps pitch differently, website copy drifts, agencies make their own assumptions, and new hires learn the story from whoever trains them. Marketing spend gets diluted across messages that compete with each other.
The test is useful precisely because it’s simple. It doesn’t require a research budget or weeks of interviews, and the results are hard to argue with. Leadership can read three answers side by side and see the gap for themselves.
How I use it in an engagement
I run the test at the very start of a fractional CMO engagement, as a light-touch pass across leadership, sales and account teams, often through a short digital survey so answers stay independent. That gives a baseline.
The gaps it reveals feed directly into the positioning work: what category the company should own, which problems it should be known for solving, and how that differs by product line or customer segment. Once leadership ratifies the positioning, it becomes the standard every later marketing and sales idea gets measured against before it’s greenlit.
Then I run the test again at day 90. Alignment is measurable, and if the answers haven’t converged, the positioning hasn’t been operationalized yet, no matter how good the brand deck looks.
What good answers look like
Good answers don’t need to be word-for-word identical. They need to agree on substance: the same customer, the same core problem, the same reason to choose you. A useful check is whether each answer could be read aloud to a prospect without contradicting the others.
What to do if you fail
Failing the test is common and it’s fixable. Start by writing down the answers you want, get leadership to ratify them, and then make them visible: in onboarding, sales scripts, the website and the internal channels people actually read. Make the positioning a mantra people can repeat, and keep testing until the answers converge.
If you’d like help running the test or acting on what it shows, let’s talk.