Tune a radio to a station that does not exist and you get static. The receiver is working perfectly. The broadcast infrastructure is intact. But nothing meaningful is coming through. The problem is not the equipment. The problem is the signal.
Most companies are broadcasting the equivalent of static. Not because they have nothing valuable to say. Not because their work is mediocre. But because the structure of their positioning - the way they frame what they are, what they do, and why it matters - produces noise rather than signal. And the market, like a radio, cannot parse meaning from noise. It moves on to the next station.
This is why most positioning fails before it starts. Not in execution. Not in distribution. At the source.
What Static Looks Like
Static has a specific structure. It is not randomness. It is the output of certain predictable positioning mistakes that most companies make because the mistakes feel like the right moves.
Borrowed Language
The most common form of static is borrowed language. Companies look at their most successful competitors, identify the language those competitors use, and incorporate versions of it into their own positioning. The logic seems sound: if the market responds to this language over there, it should respond to similar language here.
The result is a market full of companies saying the same things in slightly different ways. "World-class." "Results-driven." "Full-service." "Strategic." "Innovative." These words have been used so many times in so many contexts that they have lost all signal value. They no longer communicate anything. They are static.
What the market hears when it encounters borrowed language is not your message. It is confirmation that you are interchangeable with everyone else who uses the same language. You have successfully communicated that you are undifferentiated.
Audience Expansion Positioning
Another reliable generator of static is what I call audience expansion positioning. This is when a company broadens its stated value proposition in an attempt to reach more people. Instead of being specific about who they are for and what they uniquely deliver, they become general. They speak to "businesses of all sizes" or "any founder who wants to grow" or "teams across every industry."
The instinct makes sense. More potential buyers equals more opportunity. But the effect is the opposite. Specific positioning signals conviction. Specific positioning signals expertise. Specific positioning tells the right buyer "this is exactly for you" with enough precision that they pay attention.
General positioning signals nothing specific to anyone. It is the marketing equivalent of a politician's answer - technically inclusive, practically meaningless.
Feature-First Framing
The third generator of static is feature-first framing. This is when a company's positioning is built around what they do rather than what changes as a result. "We offer brand strategy, content creation, SEO, and social media management." The list of services is accurate. It is also static.
What the market needs to hear is not what you do. It is what reality looks like after you have done it. The transformation. The before and after. The specific, vivid, emotionally resonant description of the state the buyer wants to be in - and your company as the direct path to that state.
Static is what you get when you describe what you are. Signal is what you get when you make the market understand what they become.
What Signal Looks Like
Signal is precise. It is specific enough to exclude the wrong buyers and attract the right ones with enough force that they feel recognized rather than targeted. It operates on multiple levels simultaneously - intellectual, emotional, and identity-level.
Signal has four properties that static lacks:
It Is Falsifiable
A signal makes a claim that can be evaluated. "We work with founders generating $5M+ in annual revenue who are building toward category leadership." This is falsifiable. Either you are that founder or you are not. Either this company works with that profile or it does not. The specificity creates credibility because it implies real conviction about who you are for and what you can deliver for them.
Static, by contrast, is unfalsifiable by design. "We help businesses grow" cannot be tested. It cannot be wrong. It signals nothing precisely because it claims nothing precisely.
It Is Surprising in the Right Way
Signal contains a perspective that the market has not encountered in that exact form before. Not a contrarian position for its own sake, but a genuine insight about the market's problem that reframes how the buyer understands their situation. When a buyer encounters this reframe and thinks "I have never heard it put that way, but that is exactly what I have been experiencing," signal has been transmitted.
It Is Consistent Across Contexts
Signal does not change depending on audience or context. The core claim, the core framing, the core voice - these are identical whether the signal is appearing in a LinkedIn post, a sales conversation, a conference keynote, or an email sequence. This consistency is not rigidity. It is the system working correctly. Consistency trains the market's pattern recognition. Over time, the market begins to complete the signal before it is fully transmitted - they know what a company stands for before the company says it.
It Operates at the Identity Level
The highest form of signal is one that speaks to who the buyer needs to become, not just what problem they need to solve. This is not manipulation. It is the recognition that every significant purchasing decision is also an identity decision. The buyer is not just buying a service. They are choosing to be the kind of person who invests in this category of solution, who works with this kind of partner, who takes this kind of company seriously. Signal that operates at the identity level bypasses the rational evaluation layer entirely. The buyer is not weighing pros and cons. They are recognizing themselves.
The Three Failure Modes
Most positioning failures fall into one of three patterns. Identifying which one applies to a specific company is the beginning of the repair work.
The Credibility Trap: The company has strong proof but weak framing. Their results are real and significant but they present them in language so generic that the market cannot extract the meaning. The signal exists at the level of the work. It never makes it to the market.
The Differentiation Vacuum: The company operates in a market where everyone uses similar language and makes similar claims. Without a clear point of differentiation, the company defaults to competing on price or relationships - two factors that do not scale and do not compound into authority.
The Audience Mismatch: The company's positioning is actually clear and strong, but it is reaching the wrong audience. The buyers who encounter it are not the ones for whom the signal is calibrated. The positioning needs to be deployed in different channels, different contexts, and different conversations - not rewritten.
The Signal Imperative
The standard advice in marketing is to make more noise. Publish more content. Run more ads. Attend more events. The implicit assumption is that reach is the variable that matters most.
It is not. Signal quality is the variable. A weak signal broadcast at high volume is still noise. A strong signal distributed at moderate volume begins to compound. It gets shared because it is worth sharing. It gets remembered because it is specific enough to remember. It gets acted on because it makes the action feel obvious rather than considered.
The companies I work with who have successfully made the transition from static to signal share one experience: they describe a period of initial discomfort with how specific, how direct, how uncompromising their new positioning is. They feel exposed. They worry about alienating buyers they could have converted with broader language.
Then the inbound starts. And it is qualitatively different. The leads arrive pre-sold, pre-qualified, and pre-committed to the engagement at the level the company needs. The sales cycle compresses. The pricing discussions disappear. The buyers who show up are the ones the positioning was written for, recognizing themselves in the signal with enough clarity that the conversation begins mid-way through the process instead of at the very beginning.
That is what signal does. Static cannot produce that outcome. No amount of static can.
