Some of it comes from operators who left the seat years ago and are repackaging what they remember with an AI wrapper. Plenty of the rest is written by people who are very good with the tools and have never sat in a board meeting where the forecast is short, or from folks recycling whatever is trending this week.
My advantage is range with real depth underneath it, and a habit of questioning my own conclusions hard enough that I've built the machines to do the questioning for me. This is the short version of who I am and what I can share.
I have positioned B2B software brands for twenty years, three times with my name on the outcome.
I know what a reposition costs before it pays, because I have lived the eighteen months where the brand goes backwards.
A position only counts when the go-to-market executes it. I came up through presales, ten years standing in front of finance buyers translating what the product does into what they actually need. Marketing that ignores how selling actually works does not survive contact with a pipeline, and I have carried both sides.
Marketing and finance meet in everything I have sold and run. I sold marketing resource management at Orbis and Infor, then connected sales and operational planning at Anaplan. From 2019 to 2026 I ran marketing at Planful, where the buyer is the CFO and the job is to run marketing in the language finance respects. I understand budgets, forecasts, and what a finance leader needs to see before they believe a marketing number.
And I operate this way in the open, on the same three rules this page opened with. The engine further down this page is that method pointed at positioning itself.
Host Analytics to Planful.
CMO · the reposition ran 2019 to 2022
I repositioned and renamed the company as CMO. Branded search up 50% in eighteen months off a zero base. Unaided recall up 30 points. New logos went from 100 to 300 a year.
And the honest part: the brand went backwards for eighteen months before it went forwards. Anyone who tells you a rebrand pays off on launch day is selling you a launch party.
MapD to OmniSci.
Repositioned an open-source database company upmarket into an enterprise motion, from eight reps and no ICP to named Fortune 500 accounts.
Anaplan.
Moved the argument from territory planning, where the product story was tidiest, to incentive compensation, where the buyer's pain was sharpest. That wedge produced the company's first Magic Quadrant leadership position.
Orbis, then Infor.
Nine years in presales, selling marketing resource management software, through Orbis's acquisition by Infor in 2012. This is where the twenty years started.
Both of these run on the same method. A system does the work in the open and shows what it did, and I stay on the hook for the call at the end.
A system that explores every route a business could take, tries to kill each one, and shows the work, including the bets it rejected and why. The engine runs the search. I make the call, and it is signed.
The engine, the method, and the advisory built on it live on their own site.
Anyone can hand you new words. The engine tests whether they will hold up before you bet a year on them.
Go to positioningengine.comThe reading layer, and it is open source. Share a link from any app and it comes back as a written assessment, filed in one library and tagged by subject rather than by the app it arrived in.
It will not assess something it could not actually read. When a fetch fails the item stays flagged until I clear it by hand. Mine holds 579 items, and the first thing it showed me was that Instagram reels are my largest single source on harness engineering.
A reading tool that finds everything valuable is one you stop believing inside a fortnight.
Read it on GitHubThe day-to-day thinking is on LinkedIn. Longer arguments run in my Diginomica byline. For the positioning work itself, start at positioningengine.com. The reading system is open source at github.com/rowantonkin-ai/commonplace. Email works too: rowan.tonkin@gmail.com.