What Positioning Actually Means
Positioning is the deliberate work of choosing one specific place in the customer's mind for your brand to occupy. Not a tagline. Not a value proposition. A category-and-context decision: when the customer thinks of "X," they should think of you. The classic example — Volvo and safety — works because Volvo spent forty years refusing to also be the sporty car, the luxury car, or the family car. They picked one mental shelf and didn't move.
The reason positioning is hard isn't that brands don't understand the concept. It's that the concept demands sacrifice. You can't own a place in the customer's mind without consciously refusing to occupy the other places — and most brands, faced with that choice, blink. They try to be many things to many people and end up being nothing in particular to anyone.
Three Frameworks That Still Work
Forty years of positioning literature has converged on a small handful of frames that keep earning their place. The three we use most:
- Trout & Ries — the mental ladder. The original framing: the customer's mind organizes categories as ranked lists, and there's room for very few brands on any given ladder. If a leading position on an existing ladder is taken, either find a new ladder (a new category) or position against the leader explicitly. This is the lens that produced Avis's "We try harder" and 7Up's "Uncola."
- Jobs-to-be-done — the hire/fire frame. Christensen's reframing: people don't buy products, they "hire" them to do a job. Positioning becomes the work of identifying the specific job your brand is the obvious choice for. It shifts the focus from category to context, which often reveals positioning openings that pure category analysis would miss.
- Category design — invent the ladder. The Play Bigger thesis: the biggest payoffs come from brands that create and name a new category instead of competing inside an existing one. Salesforce did this with "cloud CRM," HubSpot with "inbound marketing." It's the highest-risk, highest-reward positioning move.
The Positioning Statement Template
After the framework choice, the work converges on a single sentence. We use a slightly modernized version of the classic template:
For [specific customer] who [specific need or job], [brand] is the [category] that [unique differentiator], because [proof or mechanism].
Every field in that sentence is load-bearing. Specific customer is not "small businesses" — it's the narrowest audience you can credibly serve better than anyone. Specific need is the job your customer is actually hiring you for, in their language. is the mental shelf you're claiming. is the one thing that's true of you and demonstrably less true of competitors. is the evidence that the differentiator isn't just an assertion. If any field is fuzzy, the positioning will be fuzzy in practice. This sentence is what your document compresses into its positioning line.
