A founder told me last month that her brand "just wasn't resonating." Ads were running, the landing page looked fine, the product worked. But leads weren't converting.
I asked her to describe the company to me as if I were a neighbour she just met at a birthday party. Five minutes, no deck.
She talked for twelve.
The test
Grab a stranger — ideally someone smart but outside your industry. Friend of a friend, Uber driver, cousin's boyfriend. Someone who has no context and no incentive to be polite.
Give yourself five minutes to explain:
- What you sell
- Who it's for
- Why it's different from the two most obvious alternatives
No whiteboard. No slides. No "it depends." No acronyms you invented. Just words, out loud, to a real human.
Then ask them: in one sentence, what does this company do?
If they can't answer cleanly, your brand isn't leaking revenue — your positioning is. Brand is the dressing on top.
Why this test is ruthless
It collapses three different problems into one:
- You don't actually know what you sell. (Common. Especially if you've pivoted.)
- You know, but you've been hiding behind abstractions. ("We empower leaders to unlock potential.") Abstractions feel safe because they're un-criticisable, but they don't land.
- Your company does too many things. Your stranger can't hold the full picture because there isn't one.
All three of these cost money. The first two look like marketing problems. The third is a business problem pretending to be a marketing problem.
What the stranger actually needs
A good positioning statement, read out loud, answers three questions in twelve words or fewer:
For [who] // we do [what] // so they get [which outcome].
That's it. That's the whole spec. When this sentence is right, the rest of the brand falls in behind it — the homepage writes itself, the sales deck compresses from twenty slides to eight, and your team stops giving three different answers to the same client question.
When it's wrong, no amount of typography fixes it.
What to do if you fail
Don't run to a designer. Don't "refresh the brand." Run the test three more times, with three more strangers. See which words keep coming out of your mouth when you're tired and impatient. Those are the true words.
Then write the positioning statement once, in the boring format above. Use it on your homepage, your LinkedIn, your first sales slide. Let designers make it beautiful afterwards.
The most expensive thing you can do is pay for design on top of confusion. The cheapest thing you can do is sit down and be honest about what you actually sell.
Five minutes, one stranger. Try it this week.