# Why positioning has to come before the logo

> Positioning is the work that comes before anyone draws a logo, and it decides whether the design that follows is any good.

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Brand Why positioning has to come before the logo
Positioning is the work that comes before anyone draws a logo, and it decides whether the design that follows is any good.
6 min Reviewed July 2026 Dave Curtin / Founder and creative director
Positioning is the work that comes before anyone draws a logo, and it decides whether the design that follows is any good. It means settling who you are for, what you sell, what you turn away, and what a customer ought to think when your name comes up. Most of it happens in conversation, long before anyone opens a design tool.
01 What positioning actually decides
Positioning produces decisions written in sentences a stranger could read without help. You settle which customers you want more of and which ones you'd rather send elsewhere, and what a buyer should believe about you before they pick up the phone. The harder one is what you're content to be worse at, since a business claiming to be strongest at everything gives a buyer nothing to hold onto.
Drawing a mark means a few hundred small judgements, and each one needs a reason. Should the letterforms read as old or new. Should the colour sit closer to a research institute or a food brand, and should the whole thing look expensive or approachable, which aren't the same and often pull against each other. Where nobody has decided who the business is talking to, those judgements get made on taste.
You feel the absence of positioning in revision rounds, when feedback arrives as a comment about not loving the blue and there's no agreed standard to measure the blue against. What that costs is partly the fee and mostly the time of two or three senior people rereading concepts on a Thursday evening. We see a month go that way fairly often.
02 Who needs to be in the room
The owner or managing director has to sit in the working sessions themselves, not only at the kickoff, because positioning decides what the business will stop doing and nobody else in the building can commit to that. Two half days spread across six weeks is roughly what it takes, and the job doesn't delegate well. If you're the person spending the money, block the time now.
Whoever talks to customers most should be in the group, which in a guesthouse means the person on the desk at seven in the morning and in an engineering firm usually means whoever quotes and loses. They hear objections in the customer's own words, and that's worth more than a competitor analysis. Four or five people is the right size, since larger groups settle on whatever nobody objects to.
A committee of eight department heads will talk the work into the middle, and a board that meets quarterly can't be the approval body for a decision you need settled in week four. Customers matter more than any of them, but they belong in interviews. On a call with someone they have never met, they will say things they would not say to you directly.
03 What the six weeks actually look like
The first two or three weeks are conversations and reading, so we interview staff, a handful of current customers, and where we can manage it, somebody who chose a competitor instead. Dave Curtin runs those calls himself, because the useful material tends to arrive in the half sentence after the answer, and a junior taking notes will miss it. We also read your sales figures and your enquiry emails.
Then a working session with the small group, normally half a day, which is closer to an argument than a presentation. We put three or four possible positions on the wall and try to break each one in turn, using what came out of the interviews rather than what anyone in the room prefers. If you leave having rejected an option you walked in liking, the session probably did its job.
A written draft goes to you after that and comes back marked up, usually twice. What it contains varies by sector, since a research centre and a shopping centre have almost nothing in common in what persuades their audiences. Brainstorm, our Irish practice, has run this sequence since 2010, and there's a longer account of how the strategy stage is structured if you want it.
04 What you should have at the end
The deliverable is a short document, ten or twelve pages, carrying a positioning statement in plain language, a description of the audiences that matter and what each of them worries about, a list of claims you won't make, and the evidence behind the claims you will. The list of claims you won't make is usually the page that causes the most argument internally.
It should also carry a messaging order for your homepage, meaning what a visitor reads first, second and third, and the reasoning for that order. That page saves more time later than anything else in the document, because it settles the argument every website project eventually has about what belongs at the top. It also keeps working when the person who commissioned it leaves.
The test is whether your marketing person can use the document on a Friday afternoon without ringing us, so hand it over with a request for a two hundred word page about one of your services and read what comes back. It feeds into the writing stage as well, where deciding what a site says, page by page turns the strategy into something a reader meets.
05 How to tell whether a studio is skipping it
The tell is timing, so if moodboards appear in week one and logo routes turn up in the first presentation, nothing was decided beforehand, whatever the proposal called that stage. Ask a studio which questions they intend to ask and who they intend to ask them of. Vague answers about workshops are worth less than a named list of six people with a reason attached to each.
Ask to see a strategy document from a finished project, redacted if it has to be, and you'll learn plenty from whether one exists at all. Ask who conducts the interviews and how many customer conversations your budget covers. On a $20,000 piece of work, expect somewhere between six and twelve of them, and expect a senior person on the calls.
Ask what work they would turn down, because a studio that has never talked a client out of a rebrand is either lucky in its enquiries or isn't asking many questions. We say no to full identity work fairly regularly, usually when the name and the mark are both fine and the real problem is that nobody reading the website can tell what the company sells. The fix there is usually the words on the page.
06 What you can do before you hire anyone
Set aside two hours this week and write down who your best three customers of the last year were and what they had in common, what you want a stranger to believe about you, and the thing you're quietly worse at. If all of that takes twenty minutes and you're confident in the answers, you probably don't need to spend $20,000 on strategy with anybody. Most owners find it takes longer.
Then ring five customers who bought in the last six months and ask what they nearly did instead, and what almost stopped them. Don't pitch anything on the call, and take notes in their words instead of tidying them into yours. An hour of that will tell you more about your position than most of what you could read, and it costs nothing beyond the awkwardness of the first call.
Last, print your own homepage and two competitors' homepages, cover the logos, and see whether anyone in your office can tell which is which. If they can't, a new mark won't fix the problem, and if they can, what you're dealing with is probably production quality, which is a smaller and cheaper job. Either way you'll walk into a studio conversation knowing what you're buying.
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