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If you’ve ever worked on a marketing team, you’ve felt it—that moment when a creative project grinds to a halt, stuck in endless feedback loops, vague criticism, and direction that keeps shifting.
This isn’t a problem of execution. It’s a problem of positioning.
Without a clear foundation, creativity gets stiffled. It becomes aimless, reactive, frustrating. Marketing teams are left in the dark, expected to make something compelling without the right inputs. The result? Work that drags on for weeks, or worse—work that is beautifully crafted but strategically useless.
I’ve learned this lesson again and again.
I learned it working in product development with external clients, when projects would slow to a crawl because no one had decided how to position the product in the market. I learned it at TV 2 when I established key art design as a discipline, figuring out how to take a programme’s positioning and turn it into creative. And I keep learning it in my own business—when I launched my photography business, I felt the pull of creative uncertainty, unsure how to develop the branding in a way that truly resonated.
Every time, I’ve had to go back to positioning. Again and again.
Here’s why skipping this step stifles creativity—and how to fix it.
Creatives don’t need micromanagement. But they do need a clear sense of where they’re going. The best work happens when the strategic intent is locked in from the start. Without it, feedback becomes scattered, conflicting, and impossible to act on.
One stakeholder wants something bold and disruptive. Another wants something safe and familiar. A third jumps in late, saying, “This isn’t quite what I had in mind.”
Without a clear definition of success, the work keeps shifting. Revisions pile up. The creative process becomes an expensive guessing game.
Marketing teams execute. They are not responsible for defining a company’s position in the market. But when positioning is unclear, they’re forced to make strategic decisions they don’t have the authority to make.
Who is this for? No one’s sure.
What’s the core message? It keeps changing.
How should this connect to the larger business strategy? That’s not clear either.
Instead of moving forward with execution, the team spends time trying to fill in the blanks. Decisions that should have been made at the leadership level now land in the laps of copywriters, designers, and campaign managers—people who were never given the mandate to shape strategy in the first place. The process slows, the work loses focus, and nobody is happy with the result.
Imagine being asked to design a house without knowing who it’s for.
You start sketching, choosing materials, planning the layout—but is this a home for a family? A single professional? A rental property? You don’t know. So you keep making adjustments, reworking the plans, second-guessing every decision, hoping it all comes together in the end.
That’s what it’s like for marketing teams working without positioning. They are creating in a vacuum, making decisions based on instinct rather than insight.
And what happens next?
The executives aren’t happy with the final product.
The team is asked to redo everything.
Creativity suffers under the weight of frustration.
It’s demoralizing. And completely avoidable.
Many people assume that defining positioning upfront limits creativity—that setting strategic guidelines will somehow make creative work rigid or formulaic. But the opposite is true.
Positioning sets the framework, the necessary boundaries within which creativity can truly unfold.
When a creative team knows:
Then, they can focus entirely on the craft itself.
Without positioning, a creative team is often not free at all. They are navigating layers of unspoken expectations, making decisions about things they were never meant to decide, and working within invisible constraints that become clear only when they’ve done something wrong.
In contrast, when positioning is clearly established, creative work flows more naturally, more wildly, more inspired.Constraints aren’t limitations; they’re the guardrails that keep creativity from turning into confusion.
Just as an artist thrives within the limits of a canvas, a musician within a key signature, or a writer within a chosen structure—marketing teams thrive when positioning gives them clarity, not control.
Great creative work doesn’t start with execution. It starts with clarity.
Every campaign, every brand asset, every piece of messaging should be built on a solid foundation. Before a single concept is developed, these questions need to be answered:
Who is this for?
What category does it belong to?
What value does it bring?
What makes it different?
These insights must be delivered in a structured brief—something that eliminates ambiguity and sets the work up for success.
When positioning is clear, the entire process changes. The team moves faster because they aren’t guessing. Feedback loops tighten because decisions have already been made. The final product is sharper, more strategic, more resonant—because it was built on a foundation that made sense from the start.
Creativity needs structure. Not constraints, but clarity. Not control, but direction. Without it, marketing becomes an expensive exercise in trial and error.
Positioning isn’t an afterthought. It’s the first step. The only step that makes everything else possible.