Brands have never had more ways to get attention. Artificial intelligence can produce a month’s worth of marketing copy before lunch. TikTok can turn an unexpected moment into a worldwide conversation. Celebrity partnerships can generate headlines overnight. Marketing departments have more customer data, more sophisticated technology and more channels for reaching people than any previous generation could have imagined. Yet amid all that sophistication, Laura Ries believes companies still struggle with a much simpler question: What does your brand stand for in the customer’s mind?
It is a question that sounds almost quaint in an era obsessed with algorithms, engagement and artificial intelligence. But Ries’s recent work suggests the opposite. The faster marketing technology becomes, the more consequential that fundamental question may be. Ries grew up unusually close to it. Her father, Al Ries, helped pioneer the concept of positioning and spent decades arguing that the real marketing battlefield isn’t the marketplace at all. It is the human mind. Laura eventually joined him in the business, co-authored books with him and built her own career advising companies around the world. Today, she isn’t treating positioning as a marketing idea preserved from another era. She’s testing it against this one. And 2026 has given her plenty of material.
Attention Is Easy. Positioning Is Hard.
Laura Ries recently joined category-design thinker Christopher Lochhead for a wide-ranging conversation about the enduring power of positioning. Their discussion began with one of the year’s attention-grabbing marketing stories—the American Eagle campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney—but quickly moved toward a much larger question. What happens after everybody notices you? A campaign can become a cultural event. A celebrity can put a brand into millions of social feeds. Controversy can produce enormous attention. None of those things necessarily tells consumers what the brand owns in their minds. That’s the distinction at the center of Ries’s thinking.
Marketing departments understandably measure what they can see: clicks, impressions, shares, views, engagement and sales. Positioning operates somewhere less visible. It asks what association remains after the campaign disappears. For Ries, positioning isn’t a slogan, a logo or a mission statement. It is the idea associated with the brand in the prospect’s mind. That is considerably harder to manufacture than attention. It also explains why Ries can admire the attention surrounding a campaign while still asking a harder strategic question about what that attention ultimately builds. Speakers.com previously explored her reaction to the American Eagle campaign, but her broader argument extends far beyond any single advertisement. A viral moment can make millions of people look at you. Positioning determines what they see.
AI Can Multiply Content. It Can’t Invent Your Position.
This distinction becomes particularly interesting when Ries turns to artificial intelligence. In June, she addressed a striking disconnect in modern marketing: companies have become extraordinarily sophisticated at execution while many marketers still struggle to clearly define positioning. AI has the potential to magnify that imbalance. Generative tools can produce more headlines, social posts, emails, images, presentations and campaign variations at a speed that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. They can make marketing organizations dramatically more productive. But productivity and strategy aren’t interchangeable.
If a company knows exactly what it wants to own in the customer’s mind, AI can become a powerful tool for expressing and reinforcing that idea. If the company’s positioning is fuzzy, however, technology can simply help it produce more fuzzy marketing, faster. The danger isn’t that AI will make marketing less sophisticated. It’s that sophistication can create the illusion of strategy. That is why Ries’s message feels unexpectedly current. The important question isn’t whether a company has adopted the newest marketing technology. It is whether that technology is amplifying something distinctive enough to remember.
Watch: Why “Better” Isn’t Enough
That distinction between being better and being different runs throughout Ries’s recent conversation with Guy Kawasaki on Remarkable People. The interview moves naturally between the history of positioning and the challenges facing contemporary brands. Ries discusses what she learned from her father, category creation, focus, visual hammers and why companies often weaken themselves by trying to expand what their brands mean. She also explores examples including Tesla and Liquid Death and the thinking behind her newest book, The Strategic Enemy: How to Build and Position a Brand Worth Fighting For.
Brand Positioning Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make
Sometimes a Brand Becomes Clearer When You Know What It Is Fighting
At the heart of Laura Ries’s recent book, The Strategic Enemy: How to Build and Position a Brand Worth Fighting For, published in September 2025, is a deceptively simple idea: difference becomes easier to understand when there is contrast. The book extends Ries’s thinking about positioning into today’s crowded marketplace. Rather than endlessly telling customers why a product is better, she encourages companies to define what their brand stands against. That “enemy” doesn’t have to be a competing company. It might be an established category, an industry convention or simply the old way of doing something. By creating that contrast, a brand can make its own position much easier to understand.
Liquid Death is a striking example. Few products would seem harder to differentiate than water, yet the company rejected nearly every familiar convention of the bottled-water category. Instead of serene mountains, purity imagery and earnest wellness messaging, Liquid Death embraced tall cans, aggressive graphics and an intentionally outrageous personality. The contrast itself helped make the brand memorable.
Tesla created a different kind of divide. Its early significance wasn’t simply that it promised a better automobile; it helped position the electric vehicle as an alternative to the traditional gasoline-powered car. Salesforce made its opposition even more explicit, using its famous “no software” symbol to dramatize the difference between its cloud-based approach and traditional installed software.
The point isn’t confrontation for its own sake. It’s clarity. When customers understand what a brand rejects, they can often understand much more quickly what that brand represents. That’s why the idea of a strategic enemy fits so naturally with Ries’s approach to positioning. Companies are often tempted to broaden their brands until they can mean many things to many people. In The Strategic Enemy: How to Build and Position a Brand Worth Fighting For, Ries argues for almost the opposite: greater focus, sharper differentiation and an idea clear enough to claim a recognizable place in the customer’s mind.
The Hotline Is Open
If The Strategic Enemy provides the larger framework for Laura Ries’s thinking, the Positioning Hotline may be its most entertaining real-world expression. Armed with her signature red telephone, Ries takes on current branding decisions and applies the principles of positioning to companies making news right now. The brands and circumstances change, but the questions remain remarkably consistent: What does the brand own in the customer’s mind ? Is it focused? Is it different? Does its visual identity reinforce that position—or is the company gradually blurring what once made it distinctive?
Recent calls have included:
- Ford F-150 Lightning — Why an EV needed its own position
- Nike — Choosing the wrong strategic enemy
- Levi’s — A World Cup lesson in the power of a visual hammer
- KFC — Looking beyond the new logo to the positioning underneath
Taken together, the Hotline episodes make Ries’s larger argument easy to see in action. Strong brands don’t need to mean everything to everyone. They need to own a clear idea, remain focused, create meaningful differentiation and reinforce that position consistently. Technology can help amplify that strategy, but it cannot substitute for having one in the first place.
Why Laura Ries’s Message Resonates Now
There is a paradox at the heart of modern marketing. Companies know more about their customers than ever before. They can target audiences with extraordinary precision, test creative ideas almost instantly, personalize communications, monitor reactions in real time and use AI to produce content at a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. Yet all of that technological power may actually be making one of marketing’s oldest challenges more difficult: standing apart from everyone else.
When every organization has access to sophisticated technology, the technology itself becomes less of an advantage. When everyone can generate polished copy, polished copy becomes less distinctive. And when brands chase the same cultural moments, respond to the same trends and optimize for the same platforms and algorithms, their marketing can begin to look and sound remarkably similar. That is what makes Ries’s answer feel so timely. It is also surprisingly simple. Know what your brand stands for—and what it doesn’t. Focus on the difference that matters. Give customers an idea they can easily understand and remember, and then reinforce that idea consistently.
The technology surrounding that process will continue to change. The human mind changes much more slowly. Perhaps that’s why positioning, a concept developed long before social media, smartphones, search engines or generative AI, feels particularly relevant today. The number of messages competing for a customer’s attention has grown exponentially, but the amount of space available in that customer’s mind has not. In a world capable of producing almost unlimited content, clarity may be more valuable than ever.
Watch: Positioning for the Executive Suite
Ries’s CXOTalk conversation with Michael Krigsman takes the argument into a more explicitly executive setting. In The Branding Manifesto: Choose Your Enemy, Win the War, she explores why positioning is ultimately a strategic leadership question rather than simply a marketing-department exercise. The conversation moves through category creation, differentiation, focus, visual hammers, line extensions and the difficulty established organizations face when disruptive categories begin emerging around them. The examples range from Tesla and Liquid Death to Salesforce, but the executive question beneath them is consistent: What are you willing to say no to in order for the market to understand what you stand for?
The Battle for the Mind Hasn’t Gone Away
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Laura Ries’s current work is how little she seems interested in defending positioning merely because of its history. Yes, the concept is inseparable from her father, Al Ries. She grew up around positioning discussions, built a career alongside him and has spent decades carrying that body of thinking forward. But nostalgia isn’t the argument. The argument is that the problem positioning was created to solve has become more severe.
Consumers are surrounded by more messages, more brands and more content. Executives have more ways to communicate with them and more data with which to analyze their reactions. Artificial intelligence is about to increase the volume of communication even further. Under those circumstances, being able to produce another message isn’t particularly remarkable. Knowing what that message should reinforce is. That is why Ries’s work has relevance well beyond marketing departments. Executives making decisions about growth, entrepreneurs entering crowded markets, sales leaders trying to explain why their offering is different and organizations confronting disruptive technology all eventually encounter the same problem. They have to decide what they want to be known for. And they have to be willing to leave other things behind.
As a keynote speaker, Laura Ries brings those questions into the room through recognizable brands, contemporary business stories and decades spent studying why some ideas find a durable place in the mind while others disappear into the noise. At a moment when AI can help virtually every organization create more, Laura’s argument offers a useful counterweight: The objective isn’t simply to say more. It’s to stand for something.
Laura Ries is available exclusively through Speakers.com for corporate meetings, marketing conferences, leadership events and other organizations looking for a provocative perspective on positioning, branding, differentiation and competing in an AI-driven marketplace. Book Laura Ries through Speakers.com.
