Three questions that reveal whether your brand has any conviction left.

We run three questions on every prospective client. Two-thirds fail. The ones that pass become the ones we work with. These are the questions.

The questions look easy. They are. The reason businesses fail them is not that the questions are hard. The reason businesses fail them is that, until somebody asks the questions out loud, nobody on the leadership team has had to commit to an answer. The questions are diagnostic of whether the firm is ready to be positioned, not whether it deserves to be.

Question 1: What does your brand refuse to be?

This is the test of differentiation. If a firm cannot name three things its brand refuses to be — three categories, audiences, or claims it will not enter — it has no edge. A brand without refusals is a brand without contours. A brand without contours cannot be perceived as different from anything else.

The right answer sounds like this: "We refuse to do services work, we refuse to take engagements under twelve months, and we refuse to pitch on RFPs." The wrong answer sounds like this: "We don't really say no to anything. We try to be flexible." The wrong answer is a confession that no positioning work has been done.

Question 2: Does your AI-generated content sound like you?

This is the test of voice integrity. Pull a piece of content the marketing team produced in the last week using AI assistance. Read it aloud. Compare it to the founder's last keynote. If the two sound like the same person, the company has voice governance. If they sound like different people, the company has voice drift — and the drift is wider every week.

Most businesses have voice drift. Most businesses do not know it because nobody is doing the comparison.

Question 3: When your CEO speaks publicly, does it strengthen or dilute the brand?

This is the test of conviction. A CEO with conviction strengthens the brand every time they speak — because their public surface is on-position, and the position is the brand. A CEO without conviction dilutes the brand every time they speak — because they hedge, generalize, or default to platitudes that any other CEO in the category could also say.

Most CEOs dilute. Not because they lack ideas — because no one has asked them to commit to one in public. That is what conviction intelligence does: extract the position the principal already holds in private and put it in the world where it can do work for the firm.

Scoring.

Each question scores 0, 1, or 2. A firm scoring below 3 of 6 is not ready for a positioning engagement — they need a leadership conversation first. A firm scoring 4 or 5 is ready and will likely move fast. A firm scoring 6 is the firm we have been waiting for: they already know what they think, they just need somebody to put the system around it.

Most brand work fails because the leadership team has not yet decided. These questions decide whether the deciding has happened.

Score yourself. The honest answer is the one worth acting on.