Ask a founder what their positioning is and you'll usually get one of two answers. The first is a long pause followed by something that sounds like a mission statement. The second is a confident, polished sentence that sounds good on a website but can't survive a follow-up question.
Both are symptoms of the same problem. The brand has a story, maybe even a compelling one, but nobody has done the strategic work of anchoring it to how buyers actually make decisions. The story reads well. The position was never built.
Positioning is the most used and least understood word in brand strategy. It gets treated as a creative exercise, something that comes out of a workshop with post-its and a copywriter. In practice, real positioning is a strategic decision about where the brand sits in the buyer's mind relative to every alternative, grounded in evidence about the market, the competition, and how the category actually works.
What positioning actually is
Positioning is the specific place the brand occupies in the buyer's mental landscape. Where the buyer, in the moment of decision, perceives the brand to sit relative to the alternatives. The founder's intention matters. The website's language matters. But the only positioning that counts is the one that exists in the buyer's head.
The classic positioning statement follows a well-established structure: for [target audience], our brand is the [frame of reference] that [point of difference], because [reasons to believe]. For a skincare brand, it might read: "For dermatology patients transitioning from prescription treatments to daily maintenance, we are the pharmacy-channel skincare line formulated at therapeutic concentrations, because our products are co-developed with the dermatologists who prescribe them and tested in the same clinical conditions as prescription actives."
Two things about this formula matter. First, the frame of reference defines who you're competing against, which is a strategic choice. A vitamin water brand could frame itself against other vitamin waters, against energy drinks, against plain bottled water, or against supplements. Each frame creates a different competitive set, a different price expectation, and a different set of associations to build. The frame of reference shapes the entire game.
Second, and this is the part most founders miss: positioning statements are internal documents. Consumers never see them. They see the slogans, the hero statements, the visual language, the packaging, the tone, all of it shaped and derived from the positioning, but never the positioning itself. The positioning is the strategic spine. Everything the audience encounters is an expression of it.
This is also why competitive positioning analysis is inherently judgment-based. You can't look up a competitor's positioning statement. You can only infer it from the cues they communicate, the claims they make, the associations they build, the category entry points they link to. Brands guard their positioning as confidential strategic information, precisely because it's the logic that all their communication decisions rest on. The strategic job is to read the signals, map the landscape, and find the space that's both valuable and defensible.
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research adds an important layer here. All brands in a category share buyers, and the degree of sharing is proportional to market share. Your customers also buy from your competitors. This means positioning has to account for the reality of buyer-sharing and the patterns of how people actually choose in the category, not a founder's idealised picture of the market.
Two schools of thought, and why good strategy bridges them
The marketing world splits into two camps on positioning. The positioning-centric school treats it as the single most important strategic decision a brand can make, the anchor for everything else. The EBI-informed school is more sceptical, arguing that empirical buyer data shows positioning effects are smaller than the industry assumes, and that mental availability, physical availability, and distinctive assets drive growth more reliably than a differentiated position.
I practise an EBI-grounded approach and I respect its empirical rigour. And I still think positioning matters, especially for brands in the early and mid stages of growth. Here's why.
A new brand entering a category cannot build mental availability from scratch without some strategic decision about where to compete, whom to reach, and which associations to build first. It doesn't have the budget to reach everyone or the presence to compete on pure availability. Positioning gives it a starting point, a deliberate choice about where to focus limited resources for maximum effect.
The tension resolves when you treat positioning as a launch pad rather than a permanent box. The position should be distinct enough to set up the right memory cues for the desired audience, but wide enough to allow growth within the category over time. The brands that get stuck are the ones that build a narrow, rigid position and then can't expand beyond it. The brands that grow are the ones that start with a clear position and gradually broaden their mental availability as resources allow.
Good strategy comes from bridging these schools, not from pledging loyalty to one. An eclectic approach, drawing on empirical evidence, competitive analysis, behavioural psychology, and pragmatic business sense, produces strategy that actually holds in the real world. Boxing yourself into one methodology is a form of strategic fragility.
The difference between positioning and a brand story
Brand stories create emotional resonance, give a team something to rally around, and help communicate what the company cares about. They're useful. They're also a different job from positioning.
A brand story for a chocolate company might say: "We believe everyone deserves a moment of genuine pleasure in their day, crafted from the world's finest cacao." Positioning for the same company says: "For premium grocery shoppers who currently choose Lindt, we are the single-origin alternative at the same price point, because our direct-trade sourcing gives us flavour profiles that blended chocolate can't replicate."
One inspires. The other competes. The story builds affinity. The positioning builds a defensible market position. When founders confuse the two, they end up with a brand that feels good internally and has no competitive traction externally.
I see this consistently in the brands I audit. The positioning section of their brand guidelines contains something aspirational and beautifully worded. When I ask the team to explain how this differentiates them from the two closest competitors, the room goes quiet. The narrative is strong. The strategic position was never built underneath it.
How to test whether your positioning is real
A few questions separate real positioning from dressed-up aspiration:
Can your team articulate it in the same words? If three people on the team describe the brand's position differently, there is no position. There's a loose understanding that hasn't been made specific enough to repeat. Real positioning is precise enough that everyone says essentially the same thing, because the logic is clear.
Does it exclude? A positioning that applies to every company in the category is a category descriptor. If your competitor could put the same statement on their website and it would still make sense, the position is empty. Real positioning says what you are by making clear what you're not.
Does it hold up against the competitive set? This requires knowing who the competitors actually are, from the buyer's perspective. Founders often define their competitive set as the companies they admire or see at the same conferences. The real competitive set is whatever the buyer weighs up at the moment of decision, which can include doing nothing, building in-house, or choosing a completely different category of solution.
Is it grounded in buyer behaviour? Positioning should be linked to the category entry points that matter in your market, the specific situations and needs that trigger a buyer to look for what you sell. If the positioning doesn't connect to how buyers actually enter the category, it exists on the website and nowhere else.
Does it translate into daily decisions? Can the team use the positioning to evaluate whether a partnership makes sense, whether a piece of content is on-strategy, whether a new product feature strengthens or dilutes the brand? Real positioning shapes every decision downstream: what you communicate, which creative approaches fit, which new products make sense, which channels to prioritise. If the positioning sits in a document and doesn't drive these choices, it's decoration.
The moat question
A strong position needs a defensible moat. The market shifts. Competitors reposition. A direct rival sees your traction and leans toward the same space. What happens to your position then?
If a competitor can claim the same position with equal credibility, the position was never yours to own. Real positioning is built on something the brand can defend: a proprietary process, a unique supply chain, a depth of expertise that would take years to replicate, a set of associations already encoded in buyer memory. The moat is what keeps the position yours when it gets contested.
This is also why positioning is a constant game. Markets evolve. New entrants arrive. Category entry points shift in importance. A position that was strong two years ago may be vulnerable today. Strategic positioning needs periodic review against the competitive landscape, the buyer's evolving behaviour, and the brand's own growth trajectory. This is one of the reasons I offer ongoing advisory relationships alongside project-based strategy work, because the strategy has to evolve with the business.
What good positioning looks like in practice
Good positioning is boring to read and powerful to use. It reads like strategy, not copywriting. From that strategic statement, everything else flows: the verbal identity, the messaging hierarchy, the visual direction, the media choices, the product decisions.
The practical output of positioning work includes a competitive map showing where every relevant alternative sits in the buyer's mind, a clear definition of which category entry points the brand is targeting, a set of associations the brand needs to own (and a set it needs to avoid), and a positioning statement that's testable, specific, and usable.
Positioning and mental availability
One of the most useful reframes from EBI research is that positioning should serve mental availability. The goal is to build the mental structures that make the brand come to mind, for the right people, in the right situations, reliably over time.
This means positioning should be designed to link the brand to as many valuable category entry points as possible, while remaining distinctive enough that every impression encodes to the right brand. Too narrow, and the brand comes to mind in only one situation. Too broad, and nothing distinctive gets encoded.
The brands that get this right feel both focused and expansive. They have a clear identity, a clear position, and they show up in enough buying moments to sustain growth. That balance is what positioning work should produce.
