On the importance of positioning, agencies as profit partners and why pulling back right now may be the costliest thing your brand can do.
By Jenny Taylor, President & Chief Growth Officer, Able&Co.
I’ll be honest, this wasn’t the blog I planned to write.
Back in January, I had something warmer in mind. An optimistic look ahead. Maybe a few lessons from the year before. Then 2026 arrived, and it arrived loud. Tariffs. Market swings. A conflict in Iran.
So here we are in Q2, and the question I keep getting from clients, peers and colleagues is some version of the same thing: What do we do now? When do we hold? When do we cut? When is it safe to push?
After seventeen years of running Able&Co. through a recession, a rebrand, a pandemic and whatever we’re calling this, here is where I’ve landed: the companies that come out of volatile periods ahead are the ones that use the uncertainty as a reason to get clearer, not quieter.
Positioning Is More Critical Than Ever
Most executives I talk to treat positioning as something the marketing team handles. A tagline refresh. A website rewrite. A new ad campaign, perhaps. And then they wonder why nothing really moves.
In my experience, positioning breaks down when it only lives in marketing. When marketing says one thing, sales promises another and operations delivers a third, there’s an alignment problem. And no amount of clever positioning copy will fix a business or organizational alignment issue.
Think about it this way. McDonald’s hasn’t changed what the Big Mac is in decades. But how they talk about it, who they’re talking to and through which channels they adapt constantly. Achieving consistency across every customer touchpoint, every sales interaction and every operational decision only happens when the entire organization is rowing in the same direction.
We work with a residential community focused on the 55-plus market. One of their challenges lay in convincing empty nesters to downsize from oversized homes with low, locked-in mortgages. What we found is that the objection was rarely about money. It was about permission. People needed someone to give them a reason to let go and confidence that a new move made sense. We stopped positioning the decision as a real estate transaction and started talking about what life looks like in the new community. Results followed.
Goodbye, Ad Agency. Hello Profit Partner.
There’s a phrase that’s come up more in how we talk about our work at Able lately: profit partner. Not vendor. Not agency of record. A real partner, meaning we’re invested in the outcome, not just the output.
It changes how you show up for a client. You stop answering the question that’s being asked and start asking whether you’re solving the right problem.
A large healthcare manufacturer came to us after going through five agencies. Every one of those agencies had done exactly what they were asked to do. The client said, “Here’s a spreadsheet. Turn it into a catalog.” Five agencies turned the spreadsheet into a catalog. On time. On budget. Not effective. What none of them did was sit down with marketing, sales and IT at the same table and ask what each team actually needed the catalog to do. It was an organizational listening problem, not a design problem. And we solved it by slowing down and asking the right questions.
That’s what we mean when we call ourselves a strategy agency. We ask harder questions, sit in the room longer and hold ourselves accountable for what happens after the creative work goes out the door.
Don’t Pull Back. Get Precise.
Here’s a conversation I find myself having these days. A client is feeling the pressure of rising material costs, thinning margins and uncertainty all around. Often, their first inclination is to pull the marketing budget and wait for the storm to clear. I understand the instinct. But I push back on it every time, sharing the opinion of a recent article by Amsive that suggests: “Rather than pulling back and risking lost market share, marketing leaders should view uncertainty as an opportunity to outmaneuver competitors with a sharper strategy and innovative thinking.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Mike Fuez, an economist with ITR Economics who spoke to my Vistage group, framed the next few years as a “battle of the margins.” His view is that revenue growth is coming for most sectors through the end of the decade. The real fight will be on profitability due to rising costs and compressed margins. Rather than wait out the storm, the answer is to know exactly where you’re profitable, focus your efforts there and stop doing the stuff that isn’t carrying its weight.
The Ones Who Win
Now we’re four months into a year that has already surprised most forecasters. What I know from watching companies navigate the last several disruptions is that the ones who come out ahead use uncertainty as a reason to get clearer about who they are, who they serve and what makes them worth choosing. Positioning won during the recession. It won during the pandemic. It wins now.
