Guest · Brand building
Paul Evans
Chief Positioning Engineer, V2RSION.COM
Two decades across brand, media and go-to-market, from Nestlé to Vodafone, now engineering how businesses get chosen.
About
Paul Evans is founder and Chief Positioning Engineer of V2RSION.COM, the positioning business he launched last year. He is known for reframing positioning from a neglected marketing step into a catalyst for business strategy, and for treating it as engineered, data-driven software rather than a one-off workshop.
Evans traces his interest to picking up a copy of Marketing Week at 14, then a route through psychology, sociology and economics into business and marketing at university. He joined Nestlé on a postgraduate scheme, learned category and brand management, and then specialised in media, growing through InBev, Kimberly-Clark and Microsoft, where he was head of media at Xbox for EMEA. Agency-side stints in China and Dubai broadened his experience before he became global head of media at Vodafone, running the discipline across 20 markets and, by his account, accountable for about a billion dollars of media and advertising investment.
At Vodafone, Evans says the team took ownership of data and technology against principles of independence, transparency and ownership, and he describes it as one of the first FTSE 100 businesses to in-house social and programmatic, around 2018 to 2019, across 10 markets. After 20 years as a media specialist he moved into consulting, working as a fractional CMO for media and ad tech businesses, before Mark Ritson's Mini MBA sharpened his view that positioning was undervalued. He built and launched V2RSION with its own definition, framework and IP, and by his account has had a strong first year.
Career26 years
- 2026 to now The Scale Factory Strategic Advisor
- 2025 to now V2RSION Founder and Chief Positioning Engineer
- 2019 to 2024 SixtyForty Founder and Fractional CMO
- 2019 to 2022 Adgile Media Advisor and fCMO
Show earlier roles: Vodafone, Havas, Mindshare, Microsoft, Kimberly-Clark, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bacardi, Nestle S.A.
- 2016 to 2019 Vodafone Global Head of Media
- 2015 to 2016 Havas Global Client Director, Emirates
- 2014 to 2015 Mindshare GM and Client Lead, Nike
- 2009 to 2014 Microsoft Head of Media, EMEA
- 2008 to 2009 Kimberly-Clark Media & Integrated Marketing Planning Manager, EMEA
- 2006 to 2008 Anheuser-Busch InBev Senior Media Marketing Manager
- 2001 to 2006 Bacardi Category Manager / Senior Product Manager
- 2000 to 2001 Nestle S.A. Category Manager
How Paul thinks3 convictions
-
Positioning as growth engine
Evans treats positioning as the largest source of untapped growth, not a soft marketing exercise. A business without clear positioning, he argues, thinks it is moving forward when it is really losing opportunity. He reads market confusion, internal misalignment and hard-won growth as the tell-tale signals.
-
Positioning is fact-based
Against the idea that positioning is intuition or the founder's opinion, Evans insists the evidence is already there in the business. He works from sales call logs, category data and case studies rather than a week-long workshop of guesswork. His role, he says, is to bring the objectivity and independence a founder cannot supply for themselves.
-
Niche down to grow
Drawing on Geoffrey Moore's bowling pin strategy, Evans warns against trying to scale into multiple categories and be everything to everybody. He argues the job is to find the first pin, the niche to go hard in, even though committing to it is uncomfortable. Knock that first pin down, he says, and expansion into the next markets becomes far easier.
