In brand strategy, positioning is how you are perceived by the market, your employer, and also by your competitors. It is the perception you want to create, or rather, what you already naturally hear from peers and want to amplify in the market. 

The product marketer's version sounds slightly different: you can't be for everyone. The same logic that says "a product that tries to serve all buyers serves none" applies to job seekers. The job market is a competitive landscape. Your target buyer is a hiring manager. Your category is the kind of marketer they need right now. Refusing to pick a lane puts you at risk of being forgettable. 

The analogy between product and personal positioning generally stays consistent. Of course, as a single person positioning yourself in the job market, you have significantly fewer resources than a C-suite executive who has the budget to spend on a personal brand advisor and a ghostwriter. 

The good news? You just need to be honest about who you're actually trying to reach, which is practically free, but hard to do. 

Nobody tells you that positioning yourself is an uncomfortable stretch between:

With a product, you can test it across multiple platforms, such as Wynter. 

With yourself, the feedback loop is slower and weirder. You don't know if the positioning is wrong or if you just haven't hit critical mass yet. The playbook assumes you have data. Early on, you're guessing, and the discipline is staying committed to the guess long enough to actually learn from it.

A product doesn't lie awake wondering whether its tagline is landing. You do.

Taylor Swift is a marketing genius. Everything she does is carefully orchestrated to fuel her public image, from her tours to planting easter eggs in her videos to her outfits to her fandom. Her brand is a product. A very good product. What she's figured out, which most artists haven't, is that the audience wants to feel like they're the ones solving the puzzle. She's giving people a participatory experience, beyond just her music. The music videos alone are an argument: in an era where almost nobody makes them seriously, hers are still events.

If anything, she makes "treat yourself like a product" look underambitious; she actually treats herself like a franchise.

Of course, if we are being real here, Taylor Swift has a team, a label, a decades-long feedback loop, and the ability to A/B test her entire personality in stadiums of 60,000 people. When we use her as the aspirational model for personal positioning, we're flattening something real into something manageable, conveniently ignoring the plethora of resources that make such orchestration possible.

And yet. We still do it. Because what she demonstrates is directionally right, even if the scale is absurd.

If you have to translate this into your personal positioning, the simplest example is to post on LinkedIn. The biggest discomfort arises from putting up posts that feel uncomfortable. Cringe mountain, they say.

This can be a meme, a photo of yourself, or something else. A lot of times, these moves may not necessarily feel aligned with the brand you are trying to create. But you have to do it to test what works and what doesn't. That's A/B testing your identity. Taylor Swift does it in arenas. Most of us do it on LinkedIn at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, second-guessing a meme we posted because we're not sure it's "on brand." It’s the same thing… 

The growth of your brand and positioning, and anything really, often lies in the discomfort of trying unfamiliar things. That is, overcoming the cringe mountain. 

Correct positioning is an act of subtraction. You choose what you are, by choosing what you're NOT. 

Positioning yourself as a ‘LinkedIn content strategist,’ for example, limits the number of clients you can access. The decision to do it anyway came down to what work people know you for and approach you for. The key principle behind positioning is 'land and expand.' You identify a key value driver for your audience, and it becomes the label that 'lands' with them. The risk is that you get slotted into a niche and have no opportunity to pivot.  

This plays out across disciplines. When you position yourself as an organic marketer, you're implicitly telling paid that you're not their person. Organic and paid aren't as separate in practice as they are on a resume. Paid informs organic strategy. Organic data feeds paid targeting. But the label sticks, and once you're the "organic person," it's hard to get reps on the paid side; nobody's handing you a Google Ads budget to learn on. You end up locked out of a whole category of roles, not because you couldn't do it, but because your positioning drew a wall.

And then there's the adjacent-field problem. Content and product marketing look close enough from the outside that moving between them feels straightforward. It's not. Product marketing is a closed club. Almost like an elite golf club membership.

Content experience doesn't automatically transfer, even when the underlying thinking is the same. If anything, the "content marketer" label makes you look like you're missing the strategic layer, even when you're not.

Both of these run counter to the promise of being a full-stack marketer and make pivots slightly harder.

There are, of course, people who make this look effortless; Jess Cook, and Marie Martens, to name a few. They are extremely honest, authentic, and transparent without making it seem like they are trying too hard. Most importantly, they are brilliant storytellers. A transferable skill across marketing disciplines, and they’ve definitely stopped us in our tracks. They skilfully weave their own personal brands with the brand narratives of their companies (Vector and Tally).

There is no universal positioning playbook. There are frameworks (some really good ones), but the key differentiator in positioning a product vs. a person is that a product usually doesn't feel ambivalent about its positioning.

The process is generally similar. The key challenge is maintaining consistency while creating distinction, especially when your personal brand is central to multiple ventures. You might be a bit more edgy in one context, but you cannot necessarily do that in another because it's for a more "serious" audience. The tone problem is real.

But it's more than tone. With a product, positioning lives in copy, in the category you claim, in the problem you're solving. With a person, positioning also has to hold in a room; in how you speak, how you disagree, how you handle the question you didn't prepare for. Especially in interviews. You can position yourself perfectly for a role and completely collapse it in a first-round interview because you defer too much, hedge every answer, or shrink when someone pushes back. A product doesn't have a bad day. A product doesn't get nervous in the room and undermine its own value prop. 

And then there's the question of what you optimize for. Industry is positioning too, and nobody talks about it enough. A content strategist for cybersecurity probably pays better than in other industries. On top of that, there are conferences, communities, and a whole content ecosystem built around it. You can position into it cleanly. However, if you don't actually find the ICP interesting, for example, if you're writing for CISOs because the money made sense, not because you're genuinely curious about what keeps them up at night, then that hollowness shows up eventually. In the writing. In the pitches. Whether you're building skills you want or skills that are just... available.

So when it comes to personal positioning advice, ‘go where the money is’ can generally be detrimental. The better questions to ask in this case are: what do you actually want to be known for? What are you keen on learning? Who do you want to market to?

We're not going to pretend like we have all the answers. But if you want to define your personal positioning, here's what you're actually choosing between:

Optimize for legibility. Pick a lane, name it clearly, and let the market sort you. This works fast. It also constrains fast. You pick a niche because it's the most visible work you have, and you stay mindful that the label may limit you before you're ready to expand.

Optimize for range. Refuse the narrow frame; show up as the full, multifaceted human being you are, with a diverse set of experiences. This feels more honest. It is also harder to market in practice. The generalist (or gen marketer) who doesn't articulate where they operate strategically is a positioning failure disguised as flexibility. Every marketer executes. The question is: can you lead strategy? Can you decide which campaigns run, in what order, toward what business outcome, and then hold the whole system accountable?

Optimize for evolution. Position specifically now, with the explicit understanding that you will outgrow it. This is what Taylor Swift actually models - deliberate reinvention with enough consistency that the audience follows.

The question is: what are you willing to be known for and NOT known for? 

We don't have the answer. We're not sure anyone does. But we think asking the question means you might give this a bit more of a thought than relying on thin frameworks out there.

Grow-th Architect is where I (Shreya Vaidya) think out loud about brand-building, positioning, and surviving on LinkedIn. If this resonated, subscribe, or share it with someone who needs to hear it. A big thanks to Nicole for collaborating on this piece. You can check out Nicole’s Substack here - Subscribe here.

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