Positioning is the context in which you get chosen. It is business strategy, not marketing decoration. And now the machines choose too.

Evans picked up a copy of Marketing Week when he was 14. Other kids wanted to be an astronaut or a train driver; he wanted to be a brand manager. He loved advertising and marketing, so he took an education path through psychology, sociology and economics, then business and marketing at university. He loves people, and people in groups, and understanding those dynamics, and marketing is all of that.

He got into Nestlé for a postgraduate role, a blue-chip training in category and brand management, then fell into media as a specialism, growing through InBev, Kimberly-Clark and Microsoft, where he was head of media at Xbox for EMEA. Agency-side stints in China and Dubai rounded out his experience before he became global head of media at Vodafone, bringing strategy to the operations of media across 20 markets and accountable for about a billion dollars of investment.

At Vodafone he took ownership of data and technology against principles of independence, transparency and ownership, and helped make it one of the first FTSE 100 businesses to in-house social and programmatic, around 2018 to 2019. That was rolled out across 10 markets and is still largely in place today.

After 20 years as a media specialist Evans wanted to get back to marketing, so he started consulting. It took five years to work out what he wanted to do. He was a fractional CMO for media and ad tech businesses and never out of work, but positioning kept coming up as the most frequently requested problem to solve. Mark Ritson's Mini MBA refreshed his thinking, and he saw positioning at the centre of strategy yet undervalued, still framed in 40-year-old terminology.

He wanted to elevate positioning, because he sees it as a superpower for any founder or CEO. So he built V2RSION and launched it last year with its own definition, framework, IP and processes, which he continues to evolve, and describes a wonderful first year.

The problem, Evans says, is that nobody knows what positioning is, because it's been stuck as a box to tick in marketing strategy. His one-sentence answer is that positioning is the context in which you are chosen as a business. For B2B technology firms that context is the urgent problem you solve, the category you serve, the competitors you differentiate against and the unique value you create.

The choosing happens largely outside your control, in LLM searches, word of mouth and conversation, where people discover your capabilities and pick you.

Search and discovery behaviour is changing fast. More than 90 percent of B2B buying processes now use AI tools in shortlisting and selection, often before ever speaking to a vendor. Evans has reframed positioning as a catalyst for business strategy: take the strategy, catalyse and translate it so it drives go-to-market, sales, marketing and product. Get positioning right and you get go-to-market right, and that's where you're discovered, in earned environments like Reddit, LinkedIn, content and digital PR.

Positioning has never been recognised for the value it delivers, Evans argues; a business without it is like driving with the handbrake on. The signals are market confusion, internal misalignment, or positive triggers like a new product, a new market or M&A.

A product can be replicated within 48 hours now, so the moat is strategy and the intangibles of brand, content and perception. Over half of startups fail and only 1 percent reach meaningful scale, there are 15,000 MarTech businesses, and this is the slowest the pace of change will ever be. Lovable's head of growth reviews positioning every 90 days, while most founders still treat it as one and done.

Evans challenges the week-long workshop. He works on a sprint basis, evidence-based and data-driven, bringing in sales call logs and category data rather than relying on opinion. He notes Harvard Business Review reporting that strategy is one of the hardest things to replace with AI, and while he wants to productise his work, he hasn't been able to recreate the connect-the-dots logic that finds the transformative space.

He named the business Version deliberately: positioning should look more like software, with a core built once and then iterated in major, minor and patch releases as internal and external dynamics change. So Ritson and he are both right. There's consistency, and the Lovable approach is careful, engineered, methodical development over time, not throwing everything out. He uses Claude and Perplexity as sparring partners, but the value comes from human curiosity and creativity in the questions.

Using water and Liquid Death as examples, Evans shows how positioning turns a base commodity into a mindset, and why he now gets hired by CEOs and founders. He looks for internal misalignment and hard-won growth as signs positioning is broken. He points to Gamma's idea of positioning market fit, where around 50 percent of revenue arrives inbound, effortlessly, because people already understand why they should choose you. It's a fact-based discipline, not a case of knowing it when you see it.

He works with businesses from a million to a hundred million dollars in revenue and draws on Geoffrey Moore's bowling pin strategy: resist being everything to everybody, find the first pin, the niche to go hard in. The pitfall he sees most is not recognising positioning is needed, like a founder eulogising 17 percent growth that's going backwards in this market. See it, then commit and go all in, because the uncomfortable choice to niche down is what makes growth easier.