What Is Positioning in Marketing? The Idea Behind It

What is positioning in marketing? It is the place your offer occupies in a buyer's mind, relative to the other options they already know about. Not what you say about yourself, and not a slogan, but the slot you end up in when someone compares you to the alternatives, which they always do, usually in a few seconds and often without noticing.

That definition sounds abstract until you notice how much follows from it. If a position is decided by comparison, then you cannot choose it in isolation. You can only choose what you are compared against, and that choice turns out to be one of the most consequential decisions in marketing.

What is positioning in marketing, exactly?

Positioning is the answer a buyer gives, silently, to the question "what is this, and why would I pick it over what I already know?"

Every offer gets a position whether or not anyone designs one. A new café is placed somewhere between the chain on the corner and the specialist roaster two streets away. A new app is placed next to the one people already have on their phone. If you do not decide where you belong, buyers decide for you, and they tend to file you under the nearest familiar thing, which is usually the least flattering comparison available.

This is why positioning comes before messaging. Messaging is what you say. Positioning is the frame that decides whether what you say makes sense. A claim that sounds impressive in one frame sounds trivial in another: "holds 40 songs" is remarkable for a music player and meaningless for a phone.

Where the idea came from

The term was introduced by Jack Trout in June 1969, in an article in the trade magazine Industrial Marketing titled "Positioning is a game people play in today's me-too market place". In 1972 Trout and his partner Al Ries expanded it into a three-part series in Advertising Age called "The Positioning Era Cometh", and in 1981 into the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

Their argument was simple and has aged well. Buyers live in what they called an overcommunicated society. Their minds are already crowded with brands, and new information is filtered against what is already there. So the job of marketing is not to create something new in the buyer's mind but to find a place in it, usually by relating the new thing to something the buyer already understands.

That was a sharp break with the advertising of the time, which mostly assumed that a good enough product, described well enough, would win. Ries and Trout's point was that the description is filtered before it arrives. The mind files first and reads afterwards.

Why "number two" worked: the Avis lesson

The case Ries and Trout returned to most often was not their own. In 1962 the car rental company Avis, a distant second to Hertz, hired the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. Instead of claiming to be the best, the agency built the campaign around the one thing everyone already knew about Avis: it was not the leader. The line was "When you're only No. 2, you try harder."

The campaign did not argue with the buyer's existing picture. It used it. Hertz was the default, and Avis became the alternative for people who suspected the default had grown complacent. Being second stopped being a weakness and became the reason to choose them.

The effect on the market is well documented. Between 1963 and 1966 the gap between the two brands narrowed from 61 to 29 in Hertz's favour to 49 to 36. Nothing about the cars had changed. What changed was the slot Avis occupied in the buyer's mind.

The general lesson is that the strongest position is often built from something the buyer already believes, rather than from a claim they would have to be talked into.

Positioning against what? The alternatives buyers actually use

The most useful modern refinement of the idea comes from the positioning consultant April Dunford, whose 2019 book Obviously Awesome starts in a different place from most marketing plans. Before asking what makes you special, she asks what a buyer would do if you did not exist.

The answer is rarely a direct competitor. More often it is a spreadsheet, a part-time assistant, a habit, an existing supplier the buyer is mildly unhappy with, or simply doing nothing. Those are the real competitive alternatives, and they are what your position has to beat.

This connects directly to a point made in how buyers actually decide: the status quo wins more decisions than any named rival, because it needs no justification. A position built only against competitors can be perfectly clear and still lose, because the buyer was never choosing between you and them. They were choosing between you and staying put.

How this is taught inside Astra Trainer

The Marketing & attention direction in the Marketing, Sales & Attention world works through why attention turns into choice: courses such as Why People Want What Other People Want, The Hidden Power of Aesthetics and Hooks, Stories & Memory look at how buyers file, compare and remember what they see.

Positioning sits underneath all of it, because a message only lands once the buyer knows what to compare it with. Lessons take about five minutes and a guide walks you through anything strange.

The five parts of a position

Dunford breaks a position into five components, and they work best in a fixed order, because each one depends on the one before.

The order matters because most people start at the end. They pick a category first, often the fashionable one, and then try to squeeze their offer into it. Starting with the alternatives forces the difference to be real, because a difference only exists relative to something.

The category is the part people underrate. It does an enormous amount of work for free. Call something a "notebook" and the buyer already knows roughly what it costs, how it is used and what to compare it with. Call the same thing a "thinking tool" and all of those assumptions disappear, which can be an advantage or a disaster depending on whether the buyer is willing to learn a new frame.

How to write a positioning statement

The best-known template comes from Geoffrey Moore's 1991 book Crossing the Chasm. It forces every part of the position into one sentence, which is its main virtue: vague positions do not survive being written down this way.

For (target buyer) who (need or problem), the (product) is a (category) that (key benefit). Unlike (main alternative), it (main difference).

A worked example, for an invented scheduling tool:

For small veterinary clinics who lose appointments to phone tag, ClinicSlot is a booking system that lets owners rebook from a text message in under a minute. Unlike the paper diary and the front-desk phone, it keeps working when the receptionist is busy with a patient.

Notice what that sentence does not do. It does not compete with large practice-management software, which the target buyer does not use. It competes with the paper diary and the phone, which they do. That is the real alternative, and the difference only makes sense against it.

The statement is an internal tool, not advertising copy. Nobody should ever read it on your website. Its job is to keep every piece of messaging pointing the same way.

Common positioning mistakes

Being for everyone. A position wide enough to include every buyer is too wide to mean anything to any of them. Narrowing feels like losing customers and usually does the opposite, because the buyers inside the narrow frame recognise themselves immediately.

Describing features instead of differences. A list of what the product does tells the buyer nothing about why it beats what they already use. Every feature has to be connected to an alternative that lacks it.

Claiming to be the best. "Best" is unfalsifiable, and buyers have learned to ignore it. A specific difference, stated plainly, is more believable than a superlative.

Copying the leader. Positioning yourself as a slightly cheaper version of the market leader puts you in a slot the buyer already considers inferior. Avis did the opposite: it built a position the leader could not occupy.

Treating a slogan as a position. A tagline can express a position. It cannot create one. If the product, the price, the channel and the message point in different directions, no line of copy will hold them together.

Why positioning is a habit, not a workshop

Positions drift. Alternatives change, new rivals appear, buyers' frames move. The skill is less about writing one perfect statement and more about noticing, regularly, what your buyers are comparing you with now.

That kind of noticing is what the daily structure of Astra Trainer is built to train. Quizzes follow each topic and each course ends with a ten-question final exam, while daily quests, points and a streak keep five-minute lessons going. A Circle gives you a small group with a shared weekly goal and live sessions, which is useful here for a simple reason: other people see your positioning from the outside, which is the only place it actually exists.

What to take from this

Positioning is the place your offer holds in a buyer's mind relative to the alternatives. It is decided by comparison, so the first choice you make is what you want to be compared with.

The idea dates from Jack Trout's 1969 article and the Ries and Trout series of 1972, built on the observation that buyers' minds are already full.

The alternative that matters most is usually not a rival brand but whatever the buyer would do without you, including nothing at all.

Which is why the most useful answer to "what is positioning in marketing" is a question, not a slogan: what would my buyer use instead, and what can I do that it cannot?