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Positioning becomes a growth engine when it shapes more than marketing language. Marni Puente and Sara Larsen show how customer research, buying-group insight, internal translation, and consistent enablement can connect positioning to product decisions and enterprise value. Their experiences reveal why durable positioning is researched, operationalized across teams, and repeated long after the initial launch.
Positioning earns strategic value when it influences how a company understands its market, develops products, enables sales, and makes decisions. A polished messaging document alone cannot create that alignment.
In a CMO Huddles Studio conversation, Marni Puente, then Senior Vice President and CMO of SAIC, and Sara Larsen, then Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Wolters Kluwer Health, explored what makes positioning useful beyond marketing.
Marni grounded the positioning discussion in evidence:
“You can’t devise a marketing strategy, and this goes for positioning as well, unless you’ve done the research. Otherwise, you’re shooting in the dark.”
Customer conversations, competitive research, sales data, and buying-group analysis can expose gaps between how a company describes itself and how value is actually understood.
Research also gives marketing a stronger basis for saying no. When positioning is grounded in evidence, it can become a filter for campaigns, partnerships, content, and product priorities.
Sara shared how Wolters Kluwer Health examined the buying committee for UpToDate. The research revealed that nonclinical buyers, including IT and operational leaders, were playing a more significant role in purchasing decisions.
That discovery led to more than revised messaging. It influenced portfolio organization, product direction, and the distinction between UpToDate Enterprise and UpToDate Pro.
The example illustrates an important difference: messaging expresses a position, while positioning helps determine where the business creates value and for whom.
Positioning can lose clarity as different teams adapt it to their own priorities. Marketing may emphasize differentiation, sales may emphasize immediate objections, and product may focus on capabilities.
Sara expanded the role beyond conventional marketing ownership:
“If you’re leading a positioning exercise, you’re not a marketer. You’re a translator and a teacher.”
Translation does not mean accepting every requested phrase. It means connecting stakeholder language to a shared strategic idea and showing how that idea affects decisions across the business.
Practical adoption may appear in:
A positioning launch may create awareness, but repetition builds organizational memory. Teams need opportunities to apply the position, test it against real conversations, and refine the proof supporting it.
The position itself can remain stable while examples and evidence evolve. That consistency helps sales, product, and leadership reinforce the same market understanding without sounding scripted.
The strongest signal of adoption is not whether employees can recite a statement. It is whether they use the position to make clearer choices.
It becomes a growth engine when it guides product, sales, marketing, and executive decisions around a shared source of value.
Positioning defines where and why the business creates value. Messaging translates that position for particular audiences and situations.
Research, stakeholder participation, practical enablement, and continued repetition can help teams apply the position in their daily work.
Market, buyer, and product changes may prompt a review. Constant rewriting, however, can prevent a position from gaining recognition internally or externally.
Listen to the full conversation with Marni Puente and Sara Larsen.
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