If it exists only in communications, customers encounter the gap quickly.
I involve the teams who deliver the experience while the positioning is being developed. Their constraints and insights help distinguish a credible promise from an attractive line. The resulting work gives marketing a clearer role in a wider business commitment.
Positioning tends to remain inside communications because of how it is usually produced. Marketing and its agencies develop it against a campaign deadline, and the teams who deliver the experience see it only at launch. The language is often aspirational, describing the business it would like to be rather than the one customers meet. Nobody is asked to measure whether the promise is kept. Over time, customers learn to discount the message, and colleagues in service and operations learn to treat brand work as something done to them rather than with them.
My practice is to build positioning around proof points. For each element of the promise, we identify the operational behaviour that would make it true, the team that owns that behaviour and the evidence a customer would actually notice. That work happens in sessions with product, service, sales and operations leaders, not only within marketing. Where a proof point does not yet exist, we decide together whether to build it, soften the claim or defer it. The positioning that emerges is narrower than a purely creative exercise might produce, but it is considerably more durable.
Consider a business that wants to be known for simplicity. Its contracts are long, onboarding involves several handoffs and its invoices are hard to read. A simplicity promise made through advertising alone would be contradicted at almost every point of contact. A credible version would involve legal, operations and finance in choosing which parts of the experience to simplify first, and marketing would wait to make the claim until customers could feel the difference. The message arrives later, but when it does it describes something real, and customers repeat it on the business's behalf.
Some colleagues argue that positioning should be aspirational, pulling the organisation towards a better version of itself. I agree that aspiration has a place. Internally, an ambitious statement can give teams a direction to work towards and a reason to change. Externally, however, a claim should be one the business can honour today, or one it can honour soon in a way customers will recognise. The answer is to separate the internal ambition from the external promise and to stage the external claims as the proof points are delivered.
This approach asks the leadership team to treat positioning as a strategic decision with real trade-offs, not as a creative output to be approved on taste. Choosing a promise means choosing what the business will invest in and what it will decline to do, and those choices belong to the whole executive. It asks the chief executive to sponsor the work visibly, and it asks marketing to give up some control over the process in exchange for a promise that the rest of the organisation is prepared to keep.
A positioning that the whole business can deliver becomes a management tool as much as a marketing one. It tells product which features matter, tells service which moments to protect and tells sales which customers to pursue. I judge a positioning by how often it settles an internal argument, not by how well it tests in isolation.