Positioning: the place a brand holds in the mind, and how to write it down

Positioning is the choice of the place a brand should hold in the minds of the people it has chosen to serve, relative to the alternatives they consider. It is the last step of segmentation, targeting and positioning and the first line of every brief that follows.

• Origin Al Ries and Jack Trout made the word famous with a three-part series in Advertising Age in 1972 and the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind in 1981^1, 3.
• Structure Kevin Lane Keller and colleagues showed that a position needs a frame of reference, points of parity and points of difference, not difference alone^5, 8.
• Challenge Ehrenberg-Bass research finds that buyers perceive little difference between competing brands, and argues for distinctiveness over differentiation^12, 13.
• Practice write it as a positioning statement, then make it the roof of the message house.

According to the Ries agency's own history, the idea had circulated in the agency for some years before a speech Al Ries gave on positioning at the Sales Executives Club of New York caught the attention of Rance Crain, editor of Advertising Age, who suggested a series of articles; three ran in April and May 1972¹. Their argument was that, in a market crowded with products and messages, communicating a brand's benefits is not enough: the marketer has to look at the mind of the prospect, find a position that is open there, and be first to fill it^1, 2. The articles were reprinted as a booklet and became the basis of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, published by McGraw-Hill in 1981^1, 3; the book is still in print⁴.

The lasting contribution is the change of viewpoint. A position is not a product feature or a tagline; it is what the target customer comes to believe about the brand compared with the alternatives. Everything the company does feeds that belief, which is why positioning is a whole-company decision and not an advertising one.

In "Three Questions You Need to Ask About Your Brand" (Harvard Business Review, September 2002), Keller, Brian Sternthal and Alice Tybout argued that managers had concentrated on the differences that set a brand apart, and that difference alone does not sustain a brand^5, 6. Keller's Strategic Brand Management develops the same structure⁸, and Kotler and Keller's Marketing Management uses it as the basis of brand positioning⁹:

Three working rules follow from it:

• Establish the frame before the difference People need to know what category a brand is in before a claimed difference makes sense. A new product often fails here, not on its difference.
• Parity points are not optional A brand that is not seen to meet the category's basic requirements will not be chosen for its difference.
• A good difference is desirable to the customer and deliverable by the company Keller's text sets criteria on both sides: relevant, distinctive and believable for the buyer; feasible, profitable and defensible for the firm⁸.

A WARC summary of the positioning literature groups points of difference into performance associations, imagery associations and consumer-insight associations, and notes that an insight alone is a weak point of difference because it is easily copied⁷.

Choosing the frame is a strategic decision in its own right. A brand can compete in a narrow frame, where it is easier to be the obvious choice, or a broad one, where the prize is larger and the competition wider. A new kind of product often has to borrow a familiar frame first ("a bank account, but on your phone") before it can claim one of its own. In business-to-business markets the frame is often set by how buyers budget and buy, so it is worth asking the sales team which line of the buyer's budget the product is paid from.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute questions how much differentiation can carry. In a 2007 paper in the Australasian Marketing Journal, Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp and Andrew Ehrenberg reported data from many categories in two countries showing that the differentiation buyers perceive between competing brands is low, and that customers keep buying the brands anyway¹³. The institute argues that brands should worry less about being meaningfully different and more about being distinctive: easy to recognise and to recall, through consistent brand assets¹².

The two views are less opposed than they sound. Keller's own structure already says that parity matters as much as difference, and the Ehrenberg-Bass findings concern perceived differentiation among brands people already buy^5, 13. For a planner, the reconciliation is practical: choose a frame and a difference that are simple enough to be remembered, express them the same way for years, and attach them to the brand's distinctive assets so that the position is recognised even when the difference is modest.

The most widely used template comes from Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, written for technology markets¹⁰. It runs: For (target customer) who (need or opportunity), the (product) is a (category) that (key benefit). Unlike (the main alternative), our product (main difference). Joining it to Keller's structure gives a working template:

Tests before it is signed off:

• Could a competitor sign it? If yes, the difference is not yet a difference.
• Can the product, the price and the service keep it? A position the marketing mix contradicts will not survive the first customer.
• Would a customer say it? The statement is an internal tool, but its difference should be expressible in the customer's words.
• Is there proof? Every "because" must be something checkable today.

The positioning statement tool walks through these fields.

A position is meant to last; changing it costs years of memory. Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin's Repositioning (McGraw-Hill, 2009) frames the reasons to move as competition, change and crisis¹¹. A simple decision path:

When a repositioning is warranted, change the meaning and keep the memory: retain the distinctive assets wherever possible, so that people can still find the brand while it changes what it stands for¹². A repositioning is also a rebrand in all but name for every team that touches customers, so plan it as one.

A workable sequence: confirm with research that the old position is really failing, and why; agree the new frame, parity and difference with every owner of a P; change the product, price or service first where the new position demands it; brief the people who meet customers; then launch the new communications, with the distinctive assets carried over. Communicating a new position before the experience has changed simply teaches customers that the brand's promises do not hold.

The position is the roof of the message house; the rest of the house is built under it.

Every discipline then takes its part: advertising carries the roof and the distinctive assets, public relations the proof, sales the frame and the parity points, and service the promise in practice. Consistency and adaptation covers how one position travels across channels and languages.

A worked example (illustrative). A start-up sells invoicing software to small businesses in the Gulf. The segment is owner-managed firms that invoice in Arabic and English. The frame is invoicing software for small businesses, an alternative to spreadsheets and to accounting suites built for larger firms. The parity points the segment checks are compliance with local e-invoicing rules, secure data handling and connections to local banks. The difference it can deliver is a bilingual invoice issued from a phone in minutes. The statement: "For owner-managed businesses in the Gulf who invoice in Arabic and English, [the brand] is the invoicing app that issues a bilingual, compliant invoice from your phone in minutes, because it was built for both languages from the start. Like other invoicing tools, it meets the e-invoicing rules and connects to local banks." The roof of the message house becomes "Bilingual invoices in minutes, from your phone"; the pillars are compliance, security and bank connections, each with proof. See the hubs for market entry and founders and small businesses.

Common mistakes:

• A position that is a list Three differences are no difference; choose one and prove it.
• Skipping parity Claiming the difference before establishing the frame and the basics⁵.
• Repositioning out of boredom Teams tire of a position long before customers have learned it¹².
• A position nobody owns If no one is accountable for keeping the product, price and service true to it, the position drifts with every campaign.

• The Ries agency's history of positioning and the 1972 articles^1, 2, and Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind^3, 4.
• Keller, Sternthal and Tybout in Harvard Business Review^5, 6, WARC's summary of the positioning literature⁷, Keller's Strategic Brand Management⁸ and Kotler and Keller's Marketing Management⁹.
• Moore, Crossing the Chasm¹⁰, and Trout and Rivkin, Repositioning¹¹.
• The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute on distinctiveness and differentiation^12, 13.
• In the glossary: positioning, value proposition and brand platform. Use the brand platform canvas to hold the position with the rest of the platform.