Our approach is a sequence, not a philosophy. It starts with the situation as it actually is — not as the last strategy described it — and ends with a communication plan that has named owners and a review date. Between those two points, we expect to be wrong at least twice.
The four tests
A positioning statement is a thesis about why a specific group should choose you over a named alternative. It has to survive four tests, and most first drafts fail the second one. The revision that passes is usually shorter and less flattering — that revision is the product, and it is why we hold the position work before the channel work rather than after.
Does it exclude anyone?
A position that describes everyone describes no one. We look for the group the statement names — and the groups it quietly gives up. German mid-market companies are often comfortable being everything to a broad segment, and this is the test that forces the choice.
Could a competitor say this?
If a named competitor can paste its own logo on the same sentence, the sentence is category noise. This is the test first drafts fail most often, because the language of a sector converges quickly.
Can a salesperson use it?
Live conversation, no rehearsal. A position that only works when it is read aloud from a slide has not yet been written. We test the sentence against the actual objections a sales team hears, not the ones a workshop imagines.
Would a customer recognise it?
We bring the sentence back to the interviews. If the people who bought from you last year do not hear themselves in it, the position describes an ambition rather than a market.
Where the work actually sits
The revision that survives all four tests is the deliverable. We hold that sentence before we ever look at a channel, because channel plans built on a weak position only spread the weakness. If a workshop produces a sentence that no one is willing to defend, we say so, and the position work continues.
Zielgruppenanalyse
Buyer personas with stock photographs are a waste of everyone's afternoon. What actually changes decisions is a small map: who signs, who blocks, who influences, and who has to be convinced last.
In German B2B sales, the last group is very often IT or procurement, and communications planning that ignores them produces beautiful material that never reaches the buyer. We build the map as a working document, with names in the rows where the client is willing. It gets updated during the engagement, which is the point.
What the map names
Stakeholder-Kommunikation
Once the position and the map exist, the message architecture is usually mechanical. Each stakeholder group gets one primary sentence and two supporting points. Investors get different framing than works councils; a trade journalist gets different framing than a customer reference.
The discipline is in what you leave out. An architecture with fourteen key messages is a list of things nobody remembers. Ours usually run to five or six, and we will defend the removal of the rest.
Change Communication
When a strategy touches how employees describe their own workplace, the failure mode is not the announcement. It is the third week, when the first version has landed and reality has not matched it yet. So we plan the second and third messages at the same time as the first.
That includes a written escalation map: who says what if a works council pushes back, if a customer escalates, if the trade press takes the wrong angle. This is unglamorous work, and it is the part clients thank us for later.
Channels, owners, cadence
Each row is a channel, an owner inside your company, a cadence, and a measurable expectation. If a channel has no owner, it is removed — because unowned channels decay quietly and consume budget while doing it.
| Channel | Owner | Cadence | Measurable expectation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trade and specialist press Load-bearing | Marketing lead with the head of product | Four briefings per year | Journalists call you for context rather than for the announcement |
| Customer references Load-bearing | Named account owner | Quarterly check-in | Two usable reference conversations per half-year, agreed in advance with the customer |
| Sales enablement material Load-bearing | Sales director | Reviewed twice a year | The sales team stops rewriting the pitch in its own words |
| Owned channels Load-bearing | Content owner in marketing | Monthly cadence | Inbound questions get more specific — fewer requests for a general overview |
| Paid distribution Experimental | Marketing lead | Bounded test per quarter | Can be cut in a cost review without the plan falling apart |
We also mark which channels are load-bearing and which are experimental. Removing the experimental ones in a cost review should not break the plan, and if it does, the plan was overbuilt.
Messbarkeit
Before launch, we agree on leading and lagging indicators with the client's own definitions. Writing the definitions yourself matters more than the choice of tool: two people in the same company using the same word for two different measurements is a common and expensive problem.
Leading indicators
Early signal
Lagging indicators
Outcomes that appear later
Implementation support
We stay for implementation. In practice that means reviewing campaign material before it ships, running the first stakeholder session, and adjusting the message architecture when the market pushes back.
It does not mean running your day-to-day. We set a review point, usually at month three and month six, where we assess whether the plan should be continued, changed, or reduced. Some engagements end at that point, and that is a good outcome, not a lost client.
Review points, on our side of the table
Month three
Is the position holding up in live conversations? Are the first messages landing where we expected?
Month six
Continue, change, or reduce. If the plan has done its work, we will say so and step back.
Then
Ownership of the message architecture sits with your team. We stay reachable for the questions that come with the second year.
Where the process has stalled
Three patterns repeat. All three are avoidable, and none of them require more budget. They require someone in the room who is willing to raise an objection before launch rather than after.
A position agreed by twelve people lands as a sentence that no one disagrees with — and a sentence no one disagrees with says nothing. The fix is a named owner for the position and a deadline for the revision, not a longer workshop.
Employees read about their own company's change in the newspaper. It happens when the internal and external calendars are planned by two teams. We draft them together on one wall, so the internal message ships a week before the external one, not a week after.
The plan is launched, applauded and never revisited. An owner of the review is a name in the plan document and a date in two calendars. It costs a meeting twice a year, and it is the difference between a document and a working strategy.
Start where you are
If you are starting a strategy effort and want a second opinion on the situation review, bring what you have — the last strategy document, the sales objections your team hears most often, or just a rough sense of who actually says yes. We will tell you inside one conversation what a sensible first phase looks like for your company, and whether the work is worth starting now or in six months.
UrbanPeak Marketing GmbH is a marketing strategy and communications consultancy in Munich. We develop and implement marketing and communications strategies for agencies and mid-market German businesses, and we stay through the implementation phase.
Landsberger Straße 302 · 80687 München · Mon–Fri, 9:00–18:00
