Somebody on a marketing team signed off on trucking snow into a city centre so a snowmobile could sit on it for an afternoon. That is a line item. It went through a budget review, it beat something else for the money, and someone will be asked at the end of the quarter whether it worked. This is a walkthrough of how that decision gets made, where the numbers go soft, and what a planner should actually be underwriting.

Positioning is the most leveraged work in marketing and the most frequently skipped. Companies would rather launch a campaign than do the foundational thinking that determines whether the campaign can land. Here’s what real positioning work looks like — and why getting it right changes everything downstream. Positioning is not messaging. Messaging is what you say. Positioning is the place you occupy in the buyer’s mind relative to every alternative. You can have beautiful messaging built on confused positioning.