A river guide once shared a powerful insight: “The biggest mistake people make in rapids isn’t failing to read the water—it’s reading it once and thinking it won’t change.” In the split second it takes to implement a decision, the current shifts, the rocks reposition, and yesterday’s perfect line becomes today’s dangerous route.
The business landscape operates with this same relentless mutability. What made you the obvious choice yesterday may not tomorrow. Your carefully crafted position can be eroded by technological shifts, competitive moves, or evolving customer expectations. The £100 million valuation that validated your positioning can evaporate when market conditions change, as countless post-pandemic startups discovered.
In our previous sections, we explored how to distill your company’s essence, carve out your ideal market position, and build gravitational mass to become the obvious choice. Now we turn to perhaps the most crucial question: how do you remain the obvious choice in a constantly changing landscape?
The answer lies in mastering the dual art of learning and storytelling—what we call continuous positioning.## Learning to Tell Stories: Always Being the Obvious Choice
A river guide once shared a powerful insight: “The biggest mistake people make in rapids isn’t failing to read the water—it’s reading it once and thinking it won’t change.” In the split second it takes to implement a decision, the current shifts, the rocks reposition, and yesterday’s perfect line becomes today’s dangerous route.
The business landscape operates with this same relentless mutability. What made you the obvious choice yesterday may not tomorrow. Your carefully crafted position can be eroded by technological shifts, competitive moves, or evolving customer expectations. The £100 million valuation that validated your positioning can evaporate when market conditions change, as countless post-pandemic startups discovered.
In our previous sections, we explored how to distill your company’s essence, carve out your ideal market position, and build gravitational mass to become the obvious choice. Now we turn to perhaps the most crucial question: how do you remain the obvious choice in a constantly changing landscape?
The answer lies in mastering the dual art of learning and storytelling—what we call continuous positioning.
Traditional positioning theory tends to treat market position as a relatively static choice—a flag planted in the competitive landscape. The frameworks we explored in our previous article—Better Alternative, Niche Focus, New Category, and Repositioning—provide powerful starting points. But as markets evolve, even the most brilliant initial positioning requires adaptation.
Consider this thought experiment: If we could somehow pause the business universe—freezing competitors, technologies, and customer preferences in place—then one-time positioning might suffice. You could find your perfect position, build your gravity, and maintain it indefinitely.
But the universe refuses to pause. The real challenge isn’t finding a position, but maintaining relevance through constant evolution while remaining true to your essence.
This challenge resembles what biologists call autopoiesis—the capacity of living systems to continuously create and maintain themselves. In business terms, autopoiesis manifests as the ability to continuously position yourself through a self-reinforcing cycle of learning and storytelling.
The goal is to create a self-authoring organisation—one that doesn’t just find a position once but continuously writes its own narrative in the market, guided by systematic learning and deliberate storytelling.
As Alan Kay, computing pioneer, famously observed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” This profound insight captures the essence of continuous positioning. Rather than merely responding to market shifts or competitor moves, self-authoring organisations actively create their future through deliberate storytelling and positioning choices. They don’t just compete within existing frameworks—they establish new frameworks where they naturally excel.
This inventive approach to positioning requires leadership ownership. The most successful companies have leaders who don’t delegate storytelling to marketing departments or position refinement to strategy consultants. Instead, they personally own and embody the narrative—connecting past origins to future vision through a coherent story that makes their company’s evolution feel both natural and inevitable. They understand that the most compelling competitive advantage isn’t just what you sell, but the narrative you own about where your industry is heading and why your approach represents the obvious path forward.
At the heart of effective storytelling lies a powerful intersection—the space where unique company stories meet authentic human experiences. This is where the real magic of continuous positioning happens.
When Bob Iger opened Shanghai Disney Resort in 2016, he articulated a guiding philosophy that encapsulates this intersection perfectly: the park would be “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese.” This wasn’t just a marketing slogan but a positioning principle that guided thousands of decisions—from architecture to entertainment to cuisine. Disney didn’t simply export its American parks; it created something that honored both Disney’s essence and Chinese cultural context.
This principle applies universally to business storytelling. The most compelling narratives are those that maintain authenticity while respecting the distinct reality of the audiences, markets, and individuals they engage with. “Authentically [The Writer], Distinctly [Your Company]” becomes a framework for narrative development that respects both sides of the storytelling equation.
This means allowing individual voices within your organization to speak authentically from their own experiences, rather than always defaulting to polished corporate messaging. When a developer shares their genuine struggle with solving a technical challenge, or a customer service representative relates a meaningful client interaction in their own voice, these stories carry a resonance that perfectly crafted marketing copy rarely achieves. The authenticity comes from the individual writer’s perspective, while the distinctiveness maintains the company and customer context.
For example, when Stripe publishes engineering blog posts written by specific team members about technical challenges they’ve overcome, or when Airbnb features stories from actual hosts about their experiences, these companies are leveraging the power of authentic individual voices within their distinct company context. This approach creates narratives that feel genuine because they are—real people sharing real experiences within the framework of the company’s broader story.
For example, when Patagonia tells environmental activism stories, they remain authentically Patagonia (grounded in their essence of environmental responsibility) while being distinctly tailored to specific conservation contexts (ocean plastics, land preservation, sustainable agriculture). These stories don’t feel like generic corporate narratives precisely because they honor both sides of this intersection.
For emerging companies building gravity, this intersection offers tremendous opportunity. While you may not have Disney’s resources, you do have access to both company stories (your founding journey, purpose, and values) and authentic human experiences (your team’s expertise, customer interactions, and personal motivations). Where these circles overlap—where your unique company story meets authentic human experiences—lies your most powerful gravitational content.
This approach makes storytelling accessible even for resource-constrained businesses. As founder or leader, you already have the raw materials needed: your authentic reasons for starting the company, the real problems you’re solving, and the genuine human stories of early customers and team members. These don’t require massive budgets—just intentional documentation and thoughtful sharing.
Effective positioning requires a constant stream of fresh insights from multiple sources:
When Airbnb launched, its positioning centred on affordability and local authenticity—the anti-hotel. As it grew, however, founder Brian Chesky recognised a more profound opportunity. “We’re not in the business of renting houses,” he explained in a 2016 interview, “we’re in the business of creating belonging.” This subtle but powerful refinement shifted Airbnb from a utilitarian alternative to hotels toward a more emotional, aspirational position.
This insight didn’t emerge from a single research report or customer survey. Rather, it crystallized through ongoing learning from diverse inputs: patterns the company observed in host behaviours, emotional language used in guest reviews, sales conversations revealing unexpected motivations, and internal reflections on what made successful experiences distinctive.
Continuous learning encompasses:
The key is creating systems that capture these insights in real-time rather than relying solely on periodic research projects. Each interaction becomes a learning opportunity that might reveal subtle shifts requiring positioning refinement.
Simultaneously, positioning demands ongoing narrative development across all touchpoints:
Netflix offers a masterclass in storytelling as the backbone of continuous positioning. From its original DVD-by-mail service to streaming pioneer to content creation powerhouse, Netflix has navigated numerous pivotal transitions, each requiring significant repositioning.
Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder, established a pattern of transparent storytelling through candid shareholder letters and public communications. When the company shifted from DVDs to streaming, Hastings didn’t just announce the change; he crafted a narrative around the inevitable future of entertainment. Even during missteps like the Qwikster debacle, where Netflix attempted to split its DVD and streaming services, Hastings’ direct communication helped preserve trust through honest storytelling.
What made Netflix’s approach remarkable wasn’t just the content of its narrative but the consistency across touchpoints. From customer communications to investor relations to internal culture, Netflix maintained narrative coherence even as its business model evolved dramatically. This storytelling symmetry—where external and internal narratives align—creates the authenticity that maintains obvious choice status through transitions.
Effective storytelling isn’t a marketing function but an organisational capability that spans twelve distinct story types:
External Stories (Market-Facing):
Internal Stories (Culture-Building): 6. Origin Stories - Sharing founding vision and institutional knowledge 7. Values-in-Action Stories - Demonstrating living values through decisions 8. Learning Journey Stories - Documenting growth experiences and adaptation 9. Impact Stories - Connecting work to meaning and broader influence 10. Future Vision Stories - Painting pictures of destinations and possibilities 11. Challenge Stories - Sharing obstacles overcome and resilience built 12. Connection Stories (Internal) - Celebrating collaboration and diverse perspectives
These story types create a comprehensive narrative portfolio, ensuring your position is communicated consistently to all stakeholders while building the culture that enables continuous evolution.
While systematic approaches to learning and storytelling provide necessary structure, some of the most powerful narrative development happens in relaxed, informal settings. Consider one of humanity’s oldest storytelling traditions—gathering around a campfire to share experiences, pass down wisdom, and strengthen community bonds.
In business contexts, these “campfire moments” often yield the most authentic stories and insights. Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp (formerly 37signals), captures this philosophy in his approach to company culture and communication. Rather than viewing storytelling as a formal marketing function, Fried embraces the perspective that “everything is marketing”—every interaction, every decision, every casual conversation shapes the narrative.
As Fried wrote in Inc. Magazine: “We behave as if everything we do is marketing. Customer service is marketing. So is product quality. The phrasing of that error message, what you call that button, how you greet your customers—it’s all marketing.”
This perspective transforms how we think about continuous positioning. If everything is marketing—if every interaction is part of your story—then your most powerful narratives might emerge not from formal campaigns but from casual conversations over lunch, customer support interactions, or impromptu team discussions.
For early-stage companies building gravitational pull, this campfire approach is particularly valuable. You may not have resources for elaborate marketing systems, but you can create space for stories to emerge naturally:
Friday Afternoon Reflections: End the week with an informal team gathering where people share customer interactions that surprised them or made them proud
Lunch and Learn Sessions: Casual knowledge sharing without rigid agendas or presentational pressure
Founder Story Hours: Regular sessions where founding team members share origin stories, challenges overcome, or lessons learned
Customer Coffee Chats: Informal conversations with customers focused on their experiences rather than sales or feedback
These modern-day “campfires” cost nothing but yield rich narrative material. Not everything needs to be formally systematized—sometimes building gravity is as simple as creating space for authentic human connection and letting the stories emerge organically.
A company with strong storytelling culture becomes a community of narrative-seekers, where everyone—not just marketers—recognizes story-worthy moments. The support representative notices a pattern in how customers describe their challenges; the engineer spots an unexpected way users are adapting a feature; the salespeople hear competitors mentioned in a new context. When these observations are celebrated and shared rather than ignored or formalized, they create a rich tapestry of continuous learning and positioning refinement.
As communities have known for millennia, sometimes the most important thing is simply to gather around the fire and chew the fat together. In those unstructured moments, the stories that truly capture your essence—and connect most authentically with others—have space to emerge.
Becoming a continuously positioned company requires more than mindset—it demands systematic infrastructure for learning, reflection, and storytelling. While specific systems vary by organisation size and industry, several foundational elements prove essential.
Fjällräven, the Swedish outdoor equipment company, maintains its obvious choice status in premium outdoor gear through a systematic approach to continuous learning. The company combines traditional market research with immersive field experiences, where product developers and marketers regularly join outdoor expeditions to observe how their products perform in real conditions and gather direct feedback from users.
To systematise this learning, Fjällräven created the “Trail Report” system, where insights from expeditions, customer service, retail partners, and online communities are documented in a standardised format. These reports are reviewed monthly, with patterns or significant findings triggering deeper investigation. This structured approach ensures market learnings aren’t random anecdotes but become systematically captured inputs for positioning refinement.
Creating your learning infrastructure might include:
While learning captures insights, storytelling systems ensure they translate into coherent narratives that reinforce your evolving position.
Beauty brand Glossier, founded by Emily Weiss in 2014, built a systematic approach to storytelling that maintains its obvious choice status with millennials seeking authenticity in beauty. The company created a dedicated “Content Studio” where editors, producers, and community managers collaborate to transform customer feedback, product development insights, and market observations into consistent stories across touchpoints.
What makes Glossier’s approach systematic rather than ad hoc is its “Story Mining” process: weekly sessions where teams specifically look for narratives emerging from customer interactions, employee experiences, and product development. These stories feed into a centralised “Story Bank” that ensures consistent positioning communication across channels from Instagram to packaging to customer service scripts.
Building your storytelling systems might include:
Beyond learning capture and storytelling, continuous positioning requires regular reflection to assess position effectiveness and guide evolution.
Monzo, the UK digital bank, implements reflective routines through its “Positioning Review” framework. Quarterly, the leadership team evaluates the company’s position across multiple dimensions: market perception (how customers describe Monzo to others), competitive differentiation (how the landscape has evolved), and essence alignment (how operational realities match positioning promises).
These sessions aren’t merely discussions but structured assessments using specific metrics: Net Promoter Score patterns, language analysis from customer communications, competitive feature comparisons, and internal culture surveys. The output isn’t just insights but specific action items for position refinement, storytelling focus areas, and operational adjustments.
Implementing reflective routines might include:
Continuous positioning requires not just conceptual understanding but practical implementation through clear rhythms and responsibilities. While frameworks must adapt to each organisation’s context, a foundational cadence provides structure without sacrificing agility.
Importantly, these rhythms should balance all three dimensions of Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game model—performance, learning, and experience. Too often, companies structure their rhythms exclusively around performance metrics (sales numbers, conversion rates, etc.) while neglecting dedicated time for learning and quality of experience.
Effective continuous positioning begins with daily habits that maintain ongoing learning and storytelling. Basecamp, the project management software company, implements this through its “Daily Learning Log” practice. Each team member records significant customer interactions, competitor observations, or internal experiences in a centralised system. These aren’t detailed reports but quick captures—screenshots of customer feedback, notes from sales calls, or observations about competitor updates.
Similarly, the company practices daily storytelling through its “Campfire” chat system, where teams share micro-narratives about customer successes, operational challenges, or market observations. These aren’t formal marketing messages but authentic anecdotes that gradually shape the company’s evolving narrative.
What makes these practices different from standard operational updates is their intentional focus on learning and experience, not just performance metrics. The question isn’t just “Did we hit our numbers?” but “What did we learn today?” and “What meaningful interactions shaped our understanding?” These daily practices create a continuous stream of raw material for the positioning cycle rather than relying on periodic, high-effort research projects or marketing campaigns.
While daily captures provide raw input, weekly sessions transform these materials into actionable patterns. Shopify implements this through “Pattern Sessions”—weekly meetings where teams review the previous week’s customer interactions, market developments, and operational experiences to identify emerging trends or significant shifts.
These sessions aren’t just discussions but structured analyses using frameworks like the “Four Corners” assessment: What are customers saying? What are competitors doing? What are we learning internally? What are broader market trends revealing? Insights are documented and tagged, creating a searchable repository of positioning inputs.
For early-stage companies with limited resources, these weekly sessions can be particularly valuable for generating authentic story material. When founders and small teams intentionally set aside time to review the week’s customer interactions through a storytelling lens, they often discover powerful narratives hiding in plain sight—a customer who used the product in an unexpected way, a particularly insightful question raised during a sales call, or a team member who went above and beyond. These stories, when captured and developed, become low-cost but high-impact gravitational content.
The weekly cadence strikes a balance between recency (capturing fresh insights) and pattern recognition (seeing beyond individual anecdotes to meaningful trends).
Monthly rhythms translate learning and storytelling into concrete positioning actions. Buffer, the social media management company, exemplifies this through its “Monthly Positioning Canvas” process, where leadership reviews the previous month’s learnings to assess potential positioning refinements.
The canvas addresses specific questions: Do we need to adjust our competitive alternatives based on market shifts? Are certain attributes resonating more strongly than anticipated? Are new customer segments emerging? Has our value translation changed? The output isn’t wholesale repositioning but incremental refinements that keep the position fresh while maintaining essence continuity.
These monthly sessions ensure positioning evolves deliberately rather than drifting accidentally or remaining artificially static.
The quarterly horizon provides space for more substantial positioning assessment and potential evolution. Transferwise (now Wise), the international money transfer service, uses quarterly “Position Summit” sessions to evaluate its market standing and competitive context comprehensively.
These summits include external perspectives (customer research, competitor analysis, market trends) and internal assessment (operational capabilities, cultural alignment, strategic priorities). The output might include significant positioning pivots, expansion into new segments, or recommitment to current approaches with refreshed execution strategies.
The quarterly timeframe allows for more significant repositioning when warranted while preventing constant reinvention that could confuse the market.
While continuous positioning manifests differently across organisations, three successful patterns emerge from companies that maintain obvious choice status through market shifts:
Some companies maintain obvious choice status by keeping their essence consistent while translating it for evolving contexts. IKEA exemplifies this approach. Its essence—democratising well-designed home furnishings—has remained remarkably stable since its 1943 founding. However, its expression has continuously evolved from catalogue retailer to experiential showrooms to digital commerce to sustainability pioneer.
IKEA’s learning systems capture changing home trends, economic conditions, and customer expectations, while its storytelling consistently reinforces the core essence with refreshed examples and applications. Recent sustainability initiatives aren’t positioned as departures from IKEA’s heritage but as modern expressions of its longstanding resource efficiency and accessibility commitments.
The lesson from essence translators is the power of maintaining philosophical consistency while demonstrating operational flexibility—showing that your core purpose remains relevant across changing contexts.
Other companies maintain obvious choice status by continuously defining new categories where they naturally lead. Salesforce demonstrates this pattern through its evolution from CRM disruptor to cloud computing pioneer to AI innovator.
Rather than competing within established categories, Salesforce continually learns from market trends to identify emerging needs, then creates new conversational frameworks where it has natural advantages. Each transition is supported by comprehensive storytelling that positions Salesforce as the obvious choice in the newly defined space.
The lesson from category creators is the power of proactive positioning—not waiting for market categories to be defined by others but continuously authoring new frameworks where your strengths naturally shine.
A third pattern emerges from companies that maintain obvious choice status by building communities that evolve alongside them. Patagonia exemplifies this approach through its decades-long development of an environmentally conscious customer community that provides both learning inputs and storytelling amplification.
Patagonia’s systematic learning from its community—through studies, activism partnerships, and direct engagement—helps the company identify emerging environmental concerns and shifting priorities. This learning feeds back into both product development and positioning evolution, ensuring the company remains the obvious choice for environmentally conscious consumers even as sustainability definitions evolve.
The lesson from community cultivators is the power of two-way dialogue—not just broadcasting positioning but creating feedback mechanisms that allow continuous co-evolution with your most committed customers.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in continuous positioning is balancing consistency with evolution—remaining recognisable while adapting to changing contexts. This tension manifests in several ways:
Effective continuous positioning maintains essence stability while allowing expression flexibility. Burberry’s remarkable turnaround under Creative Director Christopher Bailey and CEO Angela Ahrendts demonstrated this balance. The company reconnected with its heritage essence—British luxury with purposeful design—while dramatically modernising its expression through digital innovation and contemporary aesthetics.
This wasn’t repositioning as much as essence rediscovery with evolved expression, allowing Burberry to become the obvious choice for a new generation while honoring its 150+ year heritage.
Another balancing challenge involves maintaining a recognisable core while experimenting at the edges. LEGO demonstrates this approach through its systematic “Core-Edge” framework. The company distinguishes between its foundational positioning elements (creativity through construction, inter-generational play, physical-digital balance) and peripheral experiments (new themes, licensing partnerships, emerging technologies).
This explicit distinction allows LEGO to maintain obvious choice status with its core audience while expanding relevance through careful edge exploration, each informed by systematic learning and consistent storytelling.
Finally, continuous positioning requires distinguishing between incremental evolution (refining existing positions) and necessary revolution (fundamental repositioning due to market disruption).
Apple faced this challenge when transitioning from a computer company to a consumer electronics leader to a digital services provider. Each shift required substantial repositioning, yet Apple maintained narrative continuity by connecting each evolution to its essence of user-centred design and technological humanity.
The key was transparent storytelling about the rationale for change—helping customers and partners understand how each transition, despite its magnitude, represented a natural evolution rather than erratic redirection.
In his influential book “Sapiens,” historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that what distinguishes humans is our ability to create and believe collectively in “shared fictions”—stories that coordinate action at unprecedented scale. Companies, brands, and market positions are, in this view, sophisticated shared fictions that exist primarily through collective belief and storytelling.
The most enduring companies understand this profound truth: your position exists not on paper or slides but in the minds of customers, employees, and partners. Maintaining obvious choice status requires continuously authoring this shared narrative through systematic learning and deliberate storytelling.
And the most powerful narratives emerge precisely at that intersection we illustrated earlier—where unique company stories meet authentic human experiences. This is truly where the magic happens in continuous positioning. When Bob Iger insisted that Shanghai Disney be “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese,” he recognized that true magic exists in this balance—honoring both your essence and the specific context in which you operate.
For founders building new ventures, this insight is liberating. You don’t need Disney’s budget to create compelling narratives—you simply need to find the stories that live at the intersection of your company’s uniqueness and authentic human experiences. These stories already exist within your organization; your task is to discover them, develop them, and give them voice.
As markets evolve, technologies advance, and competitors emerge, the ability to remain the obvious choice depends not on static positioning but on creating a self-authoring organisation—one that continuously learns from the market, reflects on experiences, refines its position, and tells authentic stories that maintain magnetic attraction even as the competitive landscape shifts.
In a world where change is the only constant, the companies that endure as obvious choices are those that master not just what they are today but what they are becoming—organisations that don’t just find a position once but continuously write their own story in concert with the market, guided by unwavering essence and fueled by continuous learning.
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