Why clarity and specificity beat broad positioning, and what we've learned building around that principle.
The short answer: Broad positioning dilutes relevance. Specificity about who you serve, under what conditions, and why your approach works is what earns trust in a crowded market. It reliably differentiates you when everyone else is following the same advice.
Over 200,000 digital agencies exist worldwide. Most of them promise results, list their services, and display a few client logos, then wonder why the pipeline is quiet.
This is a positioning problem, and it is not limited to agencies. Freelancers, consultants, and anyone building a personal brand in a crowded market are running into the same wall.
The standard advice has been repeated so many times it no longer differentiates: niche down, post consistently, show your results.
The advice isn't wrong. But when the whole market uses the same tricks, the tricks stop working.
We think about this a lot at Open Commerce. Not because we have solved it, but because the tension between breadth and depth is one we navigate with our clients constantly, and one we have had to navigate in building our own practice.
Specificity earns trust, vagueness slides off
The instinct when building a business is to appear capable across as many dimensions as possible. Big claims, polished assets, confident positioning. The problem is that when everyone does this, it all starts to blur together.
What actually earns attention and trust is specificity, not just what you do, but the precise conditions under which you do it best, for whom, and why your approach produces the results it does.
When we work with clients on platform selection, for example, we are often asked which platform we recommend. The honest answer is: it depends, and our job is to make sure the decision is made on the right grounds, not on whoever has the best sales pitch.
That commitment to platform independence is not a positioning tactic. It is a structural constraint we built into the business. We work with Shopware, Adobe Commerce, Magento, Shopify, and others, because being genuinely useful means being genuinely unbiased.
That kind of specificity does something generic positioning cannot: it speaks directly to a fear the client already has.
The fear that the agency recommending platform x is doing so because they are a certified partner, not because it is right for the business. Vague claims slide off people. Specific ones stick and specific structural commitments stick even harder.
Narrow your audience to deepen your relevance
One of the most common mistakes in a competitive landscape is trying to stay broad. The logic feels sound. A wider net catches more opportunities. In practice, it catches less of the right ones.
When you get specific about who you serve and what problem you actually solve, you stop competing on volume and start competing on fit. You attract the clients and opportunities that are right for you. More importantly, you can speak to their real challenges in a way that generic positioning never can.
The businesses and individuals who stand out are rarely the ones with the broadest offer. They are the ones who made a clear choice about where they wanted to be relevant and then went deep.
Show your thinking, not just your results
Our work with Maxilia is a good example. They came to us with an outdated monolithic system and real operational inefficiencies. The visible output, a composable Shopware-based landscape integrated with HubSpot and a WMS, is the part that looks good in a case study.
But the work that mattered most was what preceded it. Service blueprint mapping, event storming workshops, identifying where the business's own workflows were the actual problem, and making sure the IT team had genuine ownership of the platform by the time we stepped back.
That last part is the part most businesses would leave out. Helping a client build the internal capability to not need you is counterintuitive if you are optimizing for dependency. It is exactly right if you are optimizing for trust.
Anyone can list outcomes. Very few people explain the logic that produced them. That gap is where real differentiation lives.
Consistency compounds
One strong campaign or a single great case study is just a data point. What builds a reputation over time is consistent, quality work. Showing up with the same standard of thinking week after week, building systems that produce results reliably, and treating every touchpoint as a reflection of what you stand for.
In a landscape that rewards novelty and quick wins, consistency is a genuine competitive advantage. Precisely because so few people sustain it.
Share the real story
Commerce has always been a people business. And in a world where more and more content is AI-generated, authentic human perspective matters more, not less.
The decision-maker who is navigating a platform migration, a vendor renewal, or an internal team that cannot keep pace with the roadmap, they do not need another list of best practices. They need to recognize themselves in what they are reading and need to feel understood before they feel anything else.
The most effective thing you can do for your business, whether you are writing a case study, publishing an article, or presenting your work, is to tell the real story. Say what was actually hard, what you learned from it, and what you would do differently next time.
Start before it feels ready
The competitive landscape does not reward waiting. It rewards movement.
A business that publishes consistently and shares genuine perspective will build more trust over time than one that only shows up when everything is perfect. Make clear choices about who you are for, what you stand for, and what you are not, and then show up with that standard, consistently, until it compounds.
