📖 Glossary

Positioning — Definition, Evidence & Common Mistakes

Positioning is designing a brand to occupy a distinctive place in the customer's mind. Here's where it comes from, what the evidence says, and how to use it.

·6 min read

Definition (≤25 words). Positioning is designing a brand's offer and image to occupy a distinctive place in the customer's mind relative to competitors.

TL;DR. Positioning is one of the oldest and most useful ideas in marketing strategy: deciding what you stand for relative to rivals, in the mind of the buyer. It was codified by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the 1970s and 80s, and it remains legitimate strategic work. But modern evidence — particularly Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute — has seriously dented the claim that brands win by carving out a sharply differentiated mental "position." Most brands in a category are seen as largely similar, and growth comes from being thought of by more people, not from being thought of as unique. Positioning done well is about choosing where and how to compete. Done lazily, it's a tagline dressed up as strategy.

What is positioning, really?

The word gets used loosely. A "positioning statement" can mean a one-line brand essence, a competitive strategy, or a creative brief. Ries and Trout, who introduced the concept, meant something specific: positioning is not what you do to a product; it is what you do to the mind of the prospect. You take a product that may be objectively similar to a competitor's and connect it to an idea — an association, a comparison, a frame — so that it occupies a particular slot when the buyer comes to choose.

The classic examples from Ries and Trout's work are comparative and relative. Avis positioned itself against Hertz ("We try harder") not by claiming to be better in absolute terms, but by owning the challenger position. 7UP became "the Uncola," defining itself against the dominant cola category. The mechanism is always the same: borrow or create a frame of reference that makes your brand the natural answer to a particular question in the buyer's head.

Done properly, positioning is a strategic choice — a decision about which competitive space to play in, which to cede, and what associations to build. It is the work that happens before the advertising, not the advertising itself.

Where does the idea come from?

The concept emerged from a series of articles by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the trade press in the late 1960s and early 1970s, beginning with "Positioning is a game people play in today's me-too market place" (Industrial Marketing, 1969). They collected and expanded the thinking into the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (Ries & Trout, 1981).

Their argument was a response to an advertising era obsessed with product features and creativity for its own sake. Ries and Trout said: in a media-saturated, product-saturated market, the product is less important than the perception of the product. You compete for mental real estate, not shelf space. Get into the mind first, or find a position the leader cannot or will not occupy, and claim it.

The idea spread because it was practical. It gave marketers a framework for competitive strategy that didn't depend on having a technically superior product. And it connected strategy to communication — the "position" should be reflected in everything the brand says and does.

What does the evidence say about positioning?

This is where the story gets more interesting — and more uncomfortable for the orthodox version.

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working from large-scale consumer panel data across many categories and countries, found that the differences buyers perceive between competing brands are weak. When you ask consumers what distinguishes Brand A from Brand B in the same category, they struggle to say much. Brands within a category are perceived as more similar than different. This is laid out in How Brands Grow (Sharp, 2010).

That finding cuts against the positioning orthodoxy in its strongest form. If buyers don't hold sharply differentiated brand positions in their minds, then the entire competitive model of "owning a unique word" is harder to sustain than Ries and Trout implied. What the data shows instead is that brands grow by increasing market penetration — getting more people to buy them, however lightly — and by building mental availability: the probability that a buyer thinks of the brand in a buying situation.

Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp, in How Brands Grow 2 (2016), reframed the competitive question. Instead of asking "what unique position do you own?" they ask "in how many buying situations does your brand come to mind?" — the category entry points. A brand that is thought of in more situations — more need states, more occasions, more problems — has more mental availability and sells more, regardless of whether it holds a single differentiated "position."

This doesn't make positioning wrong. It changes what positioning is for. Positioning is not about planting a single unique flag in the consumer's mind. It is about choosing the competitive frame and the set of associations that give your brand the broadest, most distinctive mental availability over time.

Where people get it wrong

  • Confusing positioning with a tagline. A slogan is an output. Positioning is the strategic decision that precedes it. If your "positioning" fits on a poster and took an afternoon to write, it's probably a line, not a position.
  • Believing differentiation is the primary growth lever. The Ehrenberg-Bass evidence is clear: competing brands are perceived as largely similar, and brands grow through penetration and mental availability, not through razor-sharp differentiation. Positioning that narrows your appeal to a "unique niche" can shrink your market penetration and stall growth.
  • Positioning for a segment you never reach. A position aimed at a narrow target audience limits your reach. If you've decided only "aspirational urban professionals" matter, you've quietly excluded most of the category buyers who could be driving your growth. (See targeting and segmentation.)
  • Ignoring that positions are relative. Positioning only works as a comparison. A brand that declares it stands for "quality and innovation" hasn't positioned itself — it's stated a platitude every competitor could also claim. Positions gain meaning from what they are positioned against.
  • Treating positioning as permanent. Markets shift, competitors move, new entrants arrive. A position that was strong a decade ago may be irrelevant today. Positioning needs periodic review against the evidence, not inscription in stone.

In practice — how to do positioning that survives contact with reality

  1. Write a real positioning statement — one that names the category, the target frame, the point of difference, and the reason to believe. Test it against the question: "could a credible competitor say this too?" If yes, it's not a position.
  2. Choose the competitive frame deliberately. Decide which category you compete in and which rivals you define yourself against. This frame shapes every downstream decision — from mental availability to pricing.
  3. Build distinctive assets, not just claims. Use Romaniuk and Sharp's work on distinctive assets — colours, shapes, characters, slogans — to make the brand instantly recognisable and to carry the position into memory, not just onto a slide.
  4. Prioritise breadth of mental availability. Don't narrow the brand to a single association so tightly that you reduce the number of buying situations in which you're considered. Aim to be thought of in more category entry points, not fewer.
  5. Review the position against commercial evidence. Track penetration, share of search, and pricing power. If the "position" isn't translating into marketing effectiveness, the strategy — not the measurement — is probably wrong.

So what?

Positioning is too useful a word to abandon, and too often abused to take at face value. The Ries and Trout version — fight for a distinctive slot in the mind — contains a real insight about competitive framing. But the evidence from Ehrenberg-Bass tells us the slot is rarely as sharp or as unique as the textbooks imply, and that growth follows the brand that is thought of by more people in more situations, not the one with the cleverest one-word claim. Position well — choose your frame, build distinctive assets, maximise mental availability — and resist the temptation to mistake a memorable slogan for a strategy.

Evidence & sources

  • Ries, A. & Trout, J. (1969). "Positioning is a game people play in today's me-too market place." Industrial Marketing.
  • Ries, A. & Trout, J. (1981). Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. McGraw-Hill.
  • Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford University Press — on weak perceived differentiation, penetration, and mental availability.
  • Romaniuk, J. & Sharp, B. (2016). How Brands Grow 2. Oxford University Press — category entry points and distinctive assets as the reframed competitive model.
  • Mark Ritson — Marketing Week column; frequent treatment of positioning as strategic choice versus tagline.

Definition type: DefinedTerm. Reviewed: 2026-07-09. Written by Andrei Tarnovski for Boringly Effective. Fundamentals over fashion.