Your Portfolio Is Not a Positioning Strategy

Architecture’s marketing tradition was born in an era when firms did not market at all. From the late 19th century until 1978, the AIA Code of Ethics explicitly prohibited advertising, competitive bidding, and most forms of self-promotion. The profession believed that marketing was beneath its dignity — work would come through reputation, referrals, and the quiet accumulation of relationships at country clubs and civic boards. When the Justice Department forced the AIA to strike those prohibitions in 1978 under antitrust pressure, the profession found itself suddenly permitted to market and completely unequipped to do so.

What emerged was not marketing. It was the portfolio. Firms built monographs, entered awards programs, hired architectural photographers, cultivated relationships with Architectural Record and Dezeen, and called this a marketing strategy. The underlying logic was unchanged from the pre-1978 era: show the work, and the right clients will find us. For the top 2% of firms — the ones whose work was visually arresting enough to get published, whose principals were charismatic enough to get profiled — this approach produced results. For the other 98%, it produced beautifully designed business cards and project sheets that sat in prospect offices unread.

Meanwhile, management consulting, investment banking, and law firms — peer professional services — spent the same half-century building category-defining intellectual infrastructure. Thought-leadership publishing. Books that shape how clients think. Conference circuits, podcasts, research arms, branded frameworks. McKinsey produces more written output in a year than most architecture firms produce in a decade. BCG’s Growth-Share Matrix is taught in every business school in the world; it is a marketing artifact disguised as an analytical framework. Bain coined Net Promoter Score and now half the Fortune 500 reports on it quarterly.

Architecture firms have done the relationship work — the developer lunches, the broker breakfasts, the long cultivation of trust. Done well, and done patiently. What they have not done is the intellectual work that makes those relationships unnecessary. When a CEO commissions a strategy project, the firms they consider have spent twenty years earning that slot in their mind through ideas they cannot trace to a specific lunch. When a developer commissions an architect, the firms they consider are the ones their broker mentioned last week — because no architecture firm has spent twenty years putting a framework in their head that named the problem before the developer realized it was a problem.

“An architecture firm with a spectacular portfolio and no positioning is like a restaurant with incredible food and no sign. The people who stumble in will love it. The people who need to know you exist will eat somewhere else.”

A portfolio is not positioning. Positioning is a claim — a specific, defensible, differentiated statement about whom you serve, what you stand for, and why you are the right answer. A portfolio is evidence. You need both, but the evidence is meaningless without the claim. The industry’s pathology is that it has spent a century accumulating evidence and never making the claim.

No segmentation — every firm wants every client.

Ask the managing partner of a mid-size firm who their ideal client is, and the answer is almost always some version of “sophisticated clients who value design.” This is not a segment. It is a wish. A real segment is specific: developers building 200-500 unit mixed-use projects in second-tier U.S. cities who need entitlement expertise and can carry a 30-month design cycle. That is a segment. It has a size, a profile, a set of decision-makers, a competitive set, and a path to reach them. Most firms cannot describe their segment this concretely. The result is marketing that is aimed at everyone and therefore lands on no one. Positioning requires the willingness to say who you are not for. Most firms cannot do this, because saying no to anyone feels like leaving revenue on the table. They are leaving far more revenue on the table by refusing to choose.

No positioning statement — every firm says the same things.

Pull the “About Us” pages of any ten architecture firms. You will find nearly identical language: “We are a design-led practice...”, “Our approach is collaborative and client-centered...”, “We believe great design can transform...”. Every one of these sentences describes the entire profession. A positioning statement is a claim that your competitors cannot credibly make. If another firm could also put your About Us copy on their website without changing a word, you do not have a positioning. You have generic industry language that lets the prospect compare you on price, because you have given them no other dimension to compare on.

No frame of reference — the client has no way to evaluate you.

When a sophisticated buyer commissions a strategy project from McKinsey, they have an entire vocabulary for evaluating the engagement — industry benchmarks, horizon models, value-capture frameworks. When the same buyer commissions an architect, they evaluate on two dimensions: did I like the renderings, and what does it cost. The profession has failed to establish any other frame of reference. This is a marketing failure, not a client failure. The clients would love to evaluate architects on more sophisticated criteria — which firm best understands the economic implications of massing choices, which firm has the strongest track record of navigating complex entitlements, which firm produces the fewest change orders in construction — but nobody has taught them how to think this way. The firm that teaches the market to evaluate on its strongest dimension wins the next project.

No 4 Ps coherence — the marketing mix contradicts itself.

Marketing’s final teaching is that the four levers must cohere. A firm that wants to position itself as premium cannot charge hourly fees (that is commodity pricing). A firm that wants to be known for bold design cannot let a BD coordinator respond to every RFP that comes in the door (that is commodity distribution). A firm that wants to lead its category cannot rely on the project-publication cycle of Dezeen to tell its story (that is commodity promotion). Most firms have designed a premium product, priced it like a commodity, distributed it like a commodity, and promoted it like a commodity — and then wonder why the market treats them like a commodity.

Three Paths Forward

The question is not whether to market. Every firm markets — whether they know it or not, whether they do it well or not. The question is whether the marketing the firm is doing is the marketing the firm needs.

Path 1 — The Category-Owner Position (the McKinsey model)

Pick a specific problem the industry has not named and become the firm that owns that name. Not a style. Not a sector. A problem. Gensler owns “workplace strategy” — a category they helped invent. Perkins&Will owns “healthcare outcomes-driven design” — they publish the research, convene the conferences, train the clients. Gehl built an entire global practice on “human-scale urbanism” — a category they defined with a book in 1971 and have owned ever since. Category ownership requires three commitments: (a) publish — books, reports, podcasts, proprietary research; (b) convene — the firm hosts the conference, not attends it; (c) decline — refuse work outside the category even when it pays, because inconsistency dilutes the position. The rewards are asymmetric: in any client’s mind, the category-owner is the default answer. You get the RFP, the call, the introduction — before anyone else is even in the conversation.

Path 2 — The Narrated Practice

Some firms do not own a category — they own a voice. The position is the principal. Bjarke Ingels gives 30+ public talks a year, has published three books, runs a documentary-quality YouTube presence, and narrates his own projects with a clarity most architects cannot produce about their own work. Thomas Heatherwick has a bestselling book (Humanise, 2023) that is explicitly a manifesto for a way of working. Jeanne Gang delivers TED talks. Kengo Kuma writes essays. The work is the evidence; the voice is the positioning. This path requires the principal to become comfortable with a level of public narration most architects find uncomfortable — but those who do produce reputations that operate as annuities. Fees rise. Better projects self-select to the practice. Top talent arrives without recruiting. A Heatherwick commission is not priced against other architects; it is priced against the alternative of not having Heatherwick. That is the economic structure of a narrated practice.

Path 3 — The Owned Audience (the platform model)

A new path is emerging that did not exist five years ago: architects and designers building direct audience relationships through platforms — newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, Instagram, TikTok — that they own rather than rent from traditional media. Dami Lee built a 500,000-subscriber YouTube channel explaining architecture to non-architects and now consults at premium rates. The Architect’s Newspaper has redesigned itself around newsletter economics. Stewart Hicks has a platform larger than most architectural magazines.

The path is no longer confined to independent creators. Christian Giordano, president and majority owner of Mancini Duffy, has spent the better part of a decade building a leadership platform under the persona “The Anti-Architect” — three years and fifty episodes into his podcast, consistent industry commentary on LinkedIn, a public position on technology and the future of practice. Mancini Duffy is now the design firm for Netflix’s $1.2 billion Fort Monmouth campus, one of the most significant commercial architecture commissions in the country. The firm’s intellectual visibility and its commercial trajectory are not unrelated.

The platform does two things at once: it builds the narrated position from Path 2 without requiring traditional media to cooperate, and it creates a direct channel to future clients, collaborators, and talent. The firm that owns its audience does not need the broker, the leasing agent, or the industry journalist. It calls prospects directly and they already know who it is. This path is genuinely new — and while a handful of firms have begun to demonstrate what it looks like at scale, the field is still wide open. The window for the firms that build the discipline now is still open. It will not be open forever.

Positioning is not a brand-consultant deliverable. It is a leadership act. Four moves the principals can make before Friday’s partner meeting:

1. Write your one-sentence positioning statement. Use a classic format: “To [specific segment], our firm is the [frame of reference] that [point of difference], because [reason to believe].” If the partners cannot collectively agree on this sentence in one meeting, the firm does not have a positioning — and that disagreement is itself the most important thing to surface. Do not settle for generic. “To sophisticated clients who value design, we are the firm that...” is not an answer. It is a hiding place.

2. Audit your own marketing against your competitors’. Pull your website, your capabilities deck, and your last three proposals. Pull the equivalent materials from your five closest competitors. Mark every sentence in your own materials that a competitor could also credibly say. Most firms find 80-90% of their own copy fails this test. Everything that fails is commodity language. Rewrite it, or delete it.

3. Pick a category, a voice, or an audience — and commit six months. Do not try all three paths. Pick one. If Path 1, identify the category you could plausibly own and publish the first real piece of research by the end of Q2. If Path 2, book the principal for three public speaking engagements in the next six months. If Path 3, start the podcast, newsletter, or YouTube channel this week — publish the first piece within ten days. Slow marketing is not marketing

4. Stop responding to RFPs that do not match your positioning. Every RFP the firm responds to is a vote for what the firm is becoming. If the firm’s positioning is “cultural buildings with civic ambition” and the firm spends three weeks responding to a generic office TI RFP, the firm has just cast three weeks of votes against its own positioning. This is painful, because RFPs feel like work-in-hand. They are, far more often, work that distracts from the work that would actually matter

The most expensive thing in professional services is not a bad hire or a failed project. It is the slot the firm does not occupy in the client’s mind — the phone call that goes to someone else because the client did not know you were the answer. Positioning is the work of filling that slot.

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~ Valerie Trent