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Not long ago, an ambitious client came to us with a high priority, high-visibility challenge: conduct positioning research to support an upcoming brand launch. They had a capable and experienced agency partner already developing hypotheses and expected a robust, conventional program of customer testing. What they didn’t yet know was that we at ThinkGen could help them go further -- beyond just testing -- to play an active role in shaping the very stimuli that would enter research.
Working hand-in-hand with their creative agency, we designed a set of energizing workshops built to stretch the team’s imagination and multiply the range of possibilities. Exercises like Brand Mirror and Post It on X, which will be described in this essay, pushed participants to explore fresh creative territory while staying grounded in customer realities. The result was not just sharper hypotheses, but a richer set of stimuli -- giving both the agency and the client more to work with, and ultimately leading to a more powerful and enduring brand story.
Positioning isn’t just what a customer hears in a detail aid, or what they see in a medical journal ad, or even the tagline on a social media post. Those are external expressions of positioning. The positioning itself is something bigger and more aspirational: it’s the core idea of what the brand stands for and how it will make a difference in the world. Done well, positioning articulates not just what the product does, but why it matters -- and even more, what the world looks like when it succeeds.
This is what makes positioning so challenging. It’s not a slogan. It’s not even the campaign idea. It’s the guiding north star for the brand: the premise, the promise, and the proof that together define how customers should think, feel, and act toward it. Positioning shapes strategy, creative, and execution alike.
Most brand teams understand the importance of consistency when it comes to projecting a compelling positioning to a customer audience. The real hurdle is defining a positioning idea that’s strong enough to deserve that consistency in the first place -- one that is both differentiated and deeply resonant with customers. For positioning to succeed, it must not only be clear and credible, but also flexible enough to be felt authentically across every touchpoint: in a rep’s narrative, a conference booth, a journal ad, a digital banner, or the tone of a LinkedIn post.
The problem is, constrained teams oftentimes jump straight into testing a narrow set of pre-baked concepts. That shortcut might save time up front, but it risks overlooking richer, more transformative possibilities. At ThinkGen, we’ve found that the key is systematic preparation: a process that unlocks creativity, widens the field of play, and produces positioning hypotheses that are sharper, bolder, and more worthy of testing.
Once we’ve aligned on what positioning really means, the next step is to create the raw material that will ultimately be tested with customers. This is where our workshops come in. The purpose of these sessions isn’t to “pick a winner” on the spot -- it’s to open up the field of possibilities and generate a wide range of ideas that can later be structured into testable stimuli. Think of them as a creative laboratory: a safe space where the brand team, agency partners, and even medical colleagues can push boundaries, borrow inspiration from outside the industry, and translate intuition into tangible hypotheses.
The exercises we use -- ranging from imaginative to tactile to rapid-fire -- are deliberately designed to get teams out of their usual frame of reference. They help participants see their brand from fresh angles, uncover emotional undercurrents, and translate complex science into simple, resonant ideas. And because our Customer Driven Positioning (CDP) process can handle a broad array of stimuli, these workshops give teams the freedom to explore widely before narrowing down.
To bring this creative laboratory to life, we guide teams through three core exercises -- Brand Mirror, Sensory Branding Lab, and Post It on X -- each designed to unlock a different dimension of brand possibility.
In this exercise, we ask teams to choose a world-class brand—Nike, Apple, Patagonia, Harley-Davidson—and use it as a “mirror” for their own. The goal isn’t imitation, but emulation: to channel how that brand might frame the customer challenge, articulate benefits, and script slogans that inspire loyalty. How would Nike describe the problem your brand is striving to solve? How would Apple translate the benefits into something both functional and aspirational? What kind of proof points would Patagonia muster to build trust?
The nuts and bolts: Teams break into small groups, each adopting a different iconic brand as their mirror. They sketch slogans, draft mock ad copy, and present their outputs to the larger group. The effect is striking: suddenly, pharma marketers are thinking like consumer titans. They start to see their own brand from the outside in, uncovering fresh angles that would never have surfaced within the traditional guardrails of healthcare marketing.
If Brand Mirror asks teams to emulate greatness, the Sensory Branding Lab asks them to experience their own brand through the senses. What does it sound like? Feel like? Taste like? What textures, colors, or moods does it evoke?
The nuts and bolts: we supply the room with poster boards, markers, scissors, and stacks of non-healthcare magazines filled with lifestyle imagery. Teams cut, paste, and assemble collages that capture the aspirational identity of their brand. Some create playlists that embody the tone they want their brand to strike. Others sketch packaging or metaphors that feel true to their product’s personality. The room quickly fills with boards, music, and visuals that go far beyond the usual PowerPoint slides.
Why it works: pharma brands rarely get the benefit of sensory cues, yet in the real world, customers are deeply sensory beings. The crisp “click” of a pen, the clean scent of a Tesla showroom, the golden arches on a red background—these cues are shorthand for trust, identity, and emotion. By surfacing sensory associations, teams uncover the emotional subtext that rational benefit statements alone can’t capture. Just as importantly, they give themselves a visual and auditory vocabulary that translates beautifully into today’s image-driven, social-first communications landscape.
Finally, speed matters. Post It on X is a timed exercise, deliberately designed to simulate the fleeting attention span of today’s customer. Teams get just a few minutes on the clock to distill the day’s big ideas into a single, social-media–ready post they’d use to launch the product.
The prompt is simple: What’s your hook? What’s the one line that would stop the scroll? The time constraint forces participants to strip away jargon and complexity, leaving only the crispest, most compelling articulation of the brand’s value.
The results are often raw and unpolished, but that’s the point. They reveal an authenticity -- and a clarity -- that doesn’t always survive the PowerPoint deck. And because if a message works in 280 characters, it tends to work everywhere, these outputs become excellent fodder for omnichannel testing, from rep calls to banners to thought-leadership posts.
These exercises don’t happen in isolation -- they’re part of a full-day workshop, either on-site or off-site, that we tailor for each brand team. Participants typically include members of the brand team, their creative agency, and often the medical team as well. Having this multidisciplinary mix is critical: it ensures that creativity is tempered with scientific credibility, and that bold ideas can be vetted for both inspiration and feasibility.
We come equipped not only with frameworks but also with arts and crafts supplies. It’s not unusual for our team to show up with an armful of magazines, poster boards, and markers. Teams cut, paste, and build inspiration boards that bring a visual feel to the brand.
Why so tactile? Because in today’s image-driven world -- especially with the rise of consumer-facing campaigns and social media -- visual cues are as important as verbal ones. This hands-on approach helps teams surface the aesthetic and emotional DNA of their brand.
By the end of the day, walls are plastered with sketches, collages, slogans, and social posts. The room itself becomes a living laboratory of brand possibilities.
The point of these exercises isn’t entertainment -- it’s output. Each yields raw material for positioning hypotheses: problem statements, benefits, reasons-to-believe.
One thing we emphasize: don’t stop at three “finished” premise–promise–proof statements. Our CDP methodology can handle a wide array of stimuli. In fact, the more the better. When teams generate a broad palette of hypotheses, they create the conditions for discovery. Sometimes the ideas that seemed too bold or too offbeat are exactly the ones that spark the most powerful customer reactions.
This is where the internal-external process shines. Internally, teams push their imagination. Externally, customers test, validate, and co-create. Together, they ensure that what enters research isn’t just plausible -- it’s inspired.
Once the workshop concludes, our work shifts from creative expansion to disciplined structuring. Together with the client’s creative agency, we inventory every output from the day -- the slogans, collages, soundtracks, sketches, and sticky notes -- and begin sorting them into the three foundational building blocks of positioning: Premise, Promise, and Proof. This step is both analytical and collaborative: we review each fragment of creative thinking, translate it into a focused statement, and slot it into the appropriate category. Within about a week, we are ready to present a structured set of testable stimuli back to the brand team for refinement.
What makes this step so powerful is the unique flexibility of the CDP process. Unlike the traditional model, which typically forces teams to bundle everything into three or four polished statements, CDP thrives on breadth. We can bring forward a wide range of premise elements, promise elements, and proof elements -- sometimes a dozen or more in each grouping -- and allow customers to engage with them individually. This gives brand teams far more latitude to explore and test different angles, turning the internal workshop into a true external laboratory. The result is a richer, more customer-driven understanding of which ideas resonate, which fall flat, and which combinations have the power to reframe the market.
To see this in action, consider a recent project in the prenatal vitamin category. The client faced a crowded, commoditized market where products were viewed by customers as interchangeable. Our challenge: help them sharpen their positioning and reframe their unique product range to stand out in the marketplace.
Step 1: Brainstorming We convened their marketing team for a hands-on workshop. Using the 3 core exercises, Brand Mirror, Sensory Branding Lab and Post It on X, participants generated a range of ideas -- from bold, lifestyle-inspired taglines to highly practical benefit statements. Our facilitators captured these and refined them into testable hypotheses.
Step 2: Research We then conducted a national qualitative study with HCPs and consumers. Respondents compared different portfolio messages, visual schematics, and brand-specific narratives. They reviewed the premise, promise and proof elements in the manner proscribed by the CDP process. What emerged was a clear winner: the notion of a “vitamin built for each stage” resonated strongly. HCPs loved the simplicity; patients valued the sense of being cared for throughout the journey. The need for a balance of product benefits and empathy was clearly apparent.
Step 3: Regroup and Align We brought the team back together to review findings and align on strategy. The decision was made to lead with the portfolio, presenting the product range as a one-stop shop. In other words, to show how this portfolio "had you covered" at each stage. This positioning was then woven into sales materials, patient education, and digital assets.
The Outcome Within months, the brand family’s market share grew significantly, propelled by a message that was simple and differentiating, and embodied a sense of caring and authenticity. More importantly, the team had a north star for execution, to guide everything from sales calls to social media posts.
Consumer brands have long understood the value of consistent, sensory-rich positioning. McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” works in a jingle, on packaging, or as a hashtag. BMW’s “Ultimate Driving Machine” shows up in advertising, product design, and even UX.
Pharma brands operate under different guardrails, but the lesson is the same: when preparation fuels positioning, consistency follows naturally.
There’s also a cultural dividend to this systematic process. Teams who go through these workshops not only generate sharper stimuli -- they build confidence in their collective creativity. They see that they can play, experiment, and still produce work that stands up to scrutiny. That energy carries forward into research, strategy, and execution.
At ThinkGen, we’re not just researchers -- we’re co-creators. Our role is to design the process, facilitate the exploration, and ensure the outputs are rigorous enough to test and flexible enough to scale across channels.
By guiding teams through Brand Mirror, Sensory Branding Lab, and Post It on X, and then channeling those outputs into CDP, we help clients move faster from ideas worth testing to positions worth owning.
Great positioning doesn’t happen by accident. It’s prepared, practiced, and pressure-tested. The more systematic the preparation, the more likely a brand will find that elusive sweet spot: relevant, differentiating, and durable across channels.
That’s the secret ingredient we’ve built into our work at ThinkGen. And as our clients are learning, it’s what transforms a routine research project into a positioning strategy with the power to move markets - and market share.
