Positioning is a verb. It is written in the present tense. Most brand decks describe what a company was — which is why most brand decks fail to position anything.
A position is what the company does, now, against named alternatives. Not what it stands for in the abstract. Not what its values are. Not its founding story. A position is an active claim about the current competitive moment. Two years from now the moment will be different and the position will need to be different. That is fine. A position is supposed to expire. That is what makes it useful.
The past-tense brand.
Most agency brand work produces a past-tense brand. The brand book describes the founder's vision from 2007. The values document was written in 2014. The mission statement was last refreshed in 2019. None of it describes what the company does, this quarter, against the three competitors who matter, in a market that just shifted under them.
This is not a small problem. It is the reason every five years the marketing team commissions another rebrand. They are looking for a position. The brand book they have describes an artifact.
What a present-tense position looks like.
It names the moment. It names the alternative. It names what the company will do that the alternative cannot. "For mid-market PE businesses in 2026 facing AI commoditization of their portcos, Fastlane is the brand stewardship firm that installs the editorial governance their internal teams cannot." That is a sentence. It expires. It will need to be rewritten in eighteen months when the moment shifts. That is by design.
How to test it.
Three tests. First, does it use present-tense verbs? If your position is "we believe in," "we strive for," "we are passionate about" — those are stative verbs. They do nothing in the world. Replace them with active verbs and the sentence either gets sharper or collapses.
Second, can it be wrong? A position that cannot be wrong is not a position. It is a value statement. Values are useful for hiring. They are not useful for differentiation.
Third, is there an expiration date implied? A real position implies a moment. The moment will change. If your position is written to last forever, it is too vague to be useful right now.
Positioning is a verb. It does work, in time, against named alternatives. If it sounds eternal, it is not doing its job.
Most brand books need to be rewritten in present tense. Most companies will not do it. The ones that do will have a position. The rest will have a book.
Get the Brand Intelligence Memo. Weekly.
Two essays a week from Chris Faust and Eduardo Pires on positioning, AI brand governance, and conviction intelligence. Unsubscribe in one click.