Strategy
Positioning that everyone agrees with is positioning that no one believes
The test of a real position isn't whether your team is comfortable with it. It's whether it makes your best competitor uncomfortable.
February 2026
Most organizations know what they want to do. Very few have thought through what they won't. We help complex B2B organizations make that call — and then build the strategy, positioning, and marketing that follows from it. The result is clarity that moves sophisticated buyers. Not more activity. More conviction.
Most organizations know what they want to do.
Very few have thought through what they won't.
More campaigns. More channels. More content. More messaging variants. It feels like progress. It almost never is.
Proliferation is the enemy of clarity. And clarity is the only thing that moves a sophisticated buyer.
Getting there requires subtracting before you add.
Read our thinking →"We don't show up with a campaign. We show up with a point of view. The campaign follows."— Campbell Edlund, Founder
We don't offer everything. We offer the things that matter most in the markets we serve — and we do them with a depth that generalist agencies can't match.
We work in sectors where the buying decision is long, the stakeholders are multiple, and the wrong message doesn't just underperform — it actively damages credibility.
All industries →Founder & Principal Strategist
"I grew up in these markets. The complexity isn't intimidating — it's the work. And the work is knowing which part of it actually matters to the buyer."
Campbell Edlund founded EMI on the conviction that complex B2B organizations deserved marketing that matched the sophistication of their buyers.
Read Campbell's story →We'll tell you what's standing between you and the response you need — and what to do about it.
We believe marketing that moves sophisticated buyers starts with a set of convictions about how markets work — and the discipline to act on them, even when it's uncomfortable.
Most marketing fails not because it's badly made.
It fails because it was built on the wrong premise.
We've spent thirty years watching organizations spend on marketing before they've answered the harder questions — who exactly is the buyer, what do they actually care about, and why should they believe you over anyone else.
Those questions feel strategic. Most firms treat them as optional. We treat them as non-negotiable prerequisites — the foundation on which everything else is built.
No strategy, no campaign. It's that simple, and that rare.
Complex B2B buyers are not persuaded by volume. They respond to a clear, credible argument that you understand their problem better than anyone else — and have a specific answer for it.
Getting to that clarity requires making choices. Most organizations resist making them. Our job is to get them made.
The instinct under competitive pressure is always to do more — more channels, more messages, more audiences, more content. This instinct is almost always wrong. Every addition to the marketing mix dilutes the signal.
The firms that win aren't the ones doing the most. They're the ones who've figured out what matters most — and stopped doing everything else.
The test of a real market position isn't whether your leadership team is comfortable with it. It's whether it makes your best competitor uncomfortable. If your position could be claimed by anyone in your category, it isn't a position. It's a description.
Real positioning requires courage. It requires saying what you're for and, just as importantly, what you're not.
One of the most reliable ways to undermine good strategy is to hand it off. When the team that developed the positioning turns it over to a separate execution team, something essential gets lost in translation.
We combine consulting rigor with agency execution precisely because the thinking and the making should never be separated. The discipline travels with the idea all the way to market.
The markets we work in are complex by nature. Many agencies treat this complexity as an obstacle to be simplified away.
We treat it as the terrain. We don't make complex things simple. We make them clear — which is a different thing entirely, and a much more useful one for a sophisticated buyer who knows the difference.
If they resonate, we should talk.
A focused set of capabilities, built for complex B2B markets. We don't offer everything. We offer the things that matter most — and we do them with a depth that generalist agencies can't match.
The decisions made before any marketing begins are the ones that determine whether it works. We help organizations answer the questions most skip: who exactly is the buyer, what do they care about, and what does this product need to be true for the market to respond.
This is the work before the work. And it's the work that makes everything that follows earn its place.
Most positioning projects produce something that generates no internal disagreement — which means they also generate no market differentiation. A position everyone agrees with is a position no one believes.
We develop positions that actually differentiate: ones that require courage to own, that make tradeoffs explicit, and that give sophisticated buyers a specific reason to choose you.
Demand generation built on audience intelligence, not channel preference. We start with a clear picture of the buyer and work backward to the channels and programs that can reach them with something worth saying.
The channel is chosen last. The message is chosen first.
Thought leadership that takes no position isn't thought leadership. It's content. We help organizations develop original intellectual property that earns market authority rather than just filling a publication calendar.
The standard we apply: would a senior buyer stop what they're doing to read this? If the answer is no, it doesn't ship.
The most common failure in B2B marketing isn't bad creative. It's the gap between what marketing produces and what sales actually uses. We close that gap by building tools and narratives grounded in how deals actually get made.
AI changes what's possible in marketing operations. It doesn't change what marketing needs to accomplish. The organizations that will benefit most aren't the ones adopting the most tools — they're the ones with the clearest strategy to amplify.
That's usually a good sign. Tell us what you're trying to solve. We'll tell you where to start.
We work in sectors where the buyer is sophisticated, the product is hard to explain, and the stakes are high enough that the wrong message does real damage. We've spent thirty years learning how those markets think.
Financial services buyers are among the most informed and skeptical in any market. They've heard every claim, seen every pitch. What moves them is specificity — a precise understanding of their regulatory environment, risk posture, and operational realities that shape every buying decision.
We've worked across banking, payments, wealth management, insurance, and capital markets. We know the language, the buyer psychology, and the compliance constraints that shape what can and can't be said.
Healthcare marketing operates at the intersection of clinical credibility, regulatory constraint, and genuine human stakes. The buyers — health system executives, clinical leaders, payers — are persuaded by evidence and by a clear understanding of their operational pressure.
We've worked with pharmaceutical companies, health systems, medical device manufacturers, and digital health platforms across the full marketing spectrum.
Enterprise technology is the market where complexity is most often used as a shield — where product teams believe that if they can explain how it works, they've made the marketing case. They haven't. The marketing case is what it changes for the buyer.
We help technology companies translate technical capability into buyer-relevant value — a discipline that requires understanding both the product and the business context it enters.
The wealth management market is undergoing its most significant transformation in a generation — driven by demographic shift, fee compression, and digital advisory models. Firms that are winning aren't the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They're the ones with the clearest story about who they serve.
We've worked with RIAs, broker-dealers, custodians, and wealth technology platforms. We understand the advisor relationship, the client acquisition challenge, and the brand differentiation problem that nearly every firm in the space faces.
Insurance is a market where most buyers are skeptical by default — conditioned by years of undifferentiated messaging and claims that didn't hold. Breaking through requires a genuine point of view about what's changing in risk, in coverage, and in the relationship between insurer and insured.
We've worked with carriers, brokers, MGAs, and insurtech platforms, helping them articulate what's genuinely different about their approach in markets where differentiation is hard-won.
The payments space has commoditized faster than almost any other financial services category. The firms building durable positions are reframing the category — from transaction processing to business intelligence, from payment acceptance to financial partnership.
We've worked with payment networks, processors, and fintech platforms developing the positioning and go-to-market strategies that make that reframing credible.
We're most useful to organizations where the stakes are high and the easy answers aren't enough.
We write about strategy, marketing, and the markets we work in. Not to demonstrate expertise. To take a position and defend it — and to be useful to the people doing the hard work of building market position in complex industries.
The banks that win in payments won't be the ones with the lowest rates. Merchant services has commoditized. Rate competition is a race to the bottom that ends with margin compression for everyone and no durable differentiation for anyone.
The banks building market position are doing something different: reframing the category entirely — from transaction processing to business partnership, from payment acceptance to financial intelligence.
Read the argument →Founder & Principal Strategist — EMI Strategic Marketing
"I grew up in these markets. The complexity isn't intimidating to me — it's the work."
Campbell Edlund has spent thirty years helping complex B2B organizations — in financial services, healthcare, and enterprise technology — find and defend meaningful market positions. She founded EMI on the conviction that the firms with the hardest stories to tell deserved the clearest thinking, not just the most capable hands.
Campbell's career began inside the industries she now markets — working in and around financial services organizations before moving to the agency and consulting side. That perspective is foundational to how EMI works: the starting point is always the buyer's world, not the client's marketing problem.
Thirty years of experience across financial services, healthcare, enterprise technology, and professional services has produced a working model of how sophisticated buyers make decisions — and what it actually takes to influence them.
It starts with clarity. It starts with the hard choice of what to own and what to leave behind. It starts with strategy.
"Most agencies arrive with answers. We arrive with better questions — because the answers are only as good as the questions that produced them."— Campbell Edlund
EMI was built to solve a specific problem: the gap between consulting firms that produce brilliant strategy and can't execute it, and agencies that execute brilliantly but have no strategic foundation.
EMI is structured to eliminate that choice. The people who develop the strategy are the people who build the work. No translation. No handoff. No loss of discipline between the thinking and the making.
That structure is a deliberate strategic choice — reflected in the length and depth of client relationships that are the firm's most consistent characteristic.
Tell us what you're working on. Campbell reads every inquiry.
We'll tell you whether we're the right firm for it — and if we are, exactly where we'd start. If we're not, we'll tell you that too.