There's a particular kind of product that defeats most marketing: the one that's genuinely complex. Deep tech, a multi-feature platform, a service with real technical substance, a category so new it doesn't have a name yet. The people who built it understand it intimately, and that intimacy is exactly the problem. They can't see it the way a buyer sees it anymore, and so the marketing ends up either drowning the buyer in detail or flattening the product into something so simple it sounds like everything else. Getting this right, making a complex thing simple without making it stupid, is one of the hardest and most valuable skills in marketing. Over 16 years and a lot of clients across very different sectors, it's the problem I've been handed most often. Here's how I approach it. The two ways positioning fails Complex products tend to fail at positioning in one of two opposite directions, and it's worth naming both because the fix for one can push you ...