I've been writing a section on positioning for my upcoming book and expected it to be one of the more straightforward chapters. Define the thing, explain why it matters, move on. Instead I found myself knee-deep in contradicting perspectives from people far more published than me, all claiming to have the definitive answer, none of them quite landing it.

After weeks of going back and forth between Ries and Trout, Kotler, Kapferer, Dunford and a small mountain of Kantar data, I've arrived at something I'm confident in. Not because it's new. Because it accounts for where the others fall short.

Positioning is the deliberate decision about what a business wants to mean to the people it's trying to reach, made in the context of what else those people could choose.

That's it. Everything else is either a component that feeds into it or a consequence that flows from it. Let me explain why I've landed there by unpicking the perspectives that got me here.

It has to be deliberate

Al Ries and Jack Trout coined the term in 1969 and wrote the book on it. Literally. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind has sold over four million copies and shaped how an entire generation of marketers thinks about brands. Their core argument is that positioning isn't what you do to a product, it's what you do to the mind of the prospect. Find an open hole in the mind and be the first to fill it. Volvo owns "safety." FedEx owns "overnight." One word, one idea, owned completely.

They're right about one thing that too many businesses ignore: if you don't choose your position, the market assigns one for you. And the market isn't generous. I've seen it happen repeatedly. A company drifts for years without making a clear positioning decision and then wonders why their proposals sound identical to three competitors and their win rate reflects it.

That's not positioning. That's drift. And you can't accidentally position a business any more than you can accidentally build a culture. You can end up with one, but it won't be the one you wanted.

It has to be about meaning, not just difference

This is where Ries and Trout get too narrow for my liking. Owning a word is a memorable framework, but it reduces positioning to a perceptual land grab. Plenty of businesses are different in ways nobody cares about. I once worked with a firm that had genuinely unique methodology. Completely novel. Nobody in their market was doing it the same way. The problem? Their clients couldn't have cared less about the methodology. They cared about outcomes. Being different meant nothing because the difference didn't carry meaning for the people they were trying to reach.

Kantar's BrandZ research supports this. Their data shows that "meaningful difference" among brands has been declining for over eight years straight, hitting new lows year after year. At the same time, their work with Oxford's Saïd Business School found that difference is the single biggest factor driving abnormal outperformance on the stock market. Brands with higher clarity of image deliver 70% more impact on sales growth.

The distinction matters. Difference alone is just novelty. Meaningful difference is positioning. It has to matter to the people you're trying to reach, not just distinguish you from the business next door.

It has to account for alternatives

April Dunford brought positioning into the B2B tech world with Obviously Awesome and her approach is refreshingly practical. She starts by asking what your customers would do if you didn't exist, then works forward from there to identify what you have that those alternatives don't.

I'd argue that much of what Dunford describes is closer to what I'd call proposition, defining what you offer and what value it delivers to a specific set of buyers. That's not a criticism of her work, it's genuinely good, but I think it's an important distinction. Proposition is the "what." Positioning is the "why you." They're related, but they're not the same thing.

Where Dunford is absolutely right is that difference doesn't exist in a vacuum. It only exists relative to what else is available. A business that defines its positioning without understanding what it's being compared to will end up with something that sounds meaningful internally but lands as generic externally.

This is also where a distinction most people miss becomes critical.

Brand positioning is not market positioning

I see this confusion constantly. Founders, marketers and leadership teams who think they're talking about brand strategy when they're actually talking about competitive placement.

Brand positioning is who you are in the mind of your audience. It's rooted in perception, meaning and belief. It's long-term, emotional and strategic. Market positioning is the competitive space you occupy in relation to price, features and function. It's where you sit on the map. Practical, comparative and tactical.

Think of it this way. Brand positioning is your character. Market positioning is your coordinates.

You need both. You need to know your coordinates before you can credibly claim your character. I worked with a professional services firm that had excellent market positioning. They knew exactly where they sat in terms of price point, service scope and target client size. Perfectly mapped out. The problem was that nobody outside the building could describe what the firm actually stood for. They had coordinates, but no character. Their website could have belonged to any of them. So could their proposals.

When brand positioning and market positioning are aligned, strategy sharpens and credibility becomes harder to argue with. When they contradict each other, people sense it immediately, even if they can't articulate why.

Positioning is part of identity, not separate from it

Philip Kotler embedded positioning into the STP framework that became the backbone of marketing education globally. Jean-Noël Kapferer went further, arguing that positioning must result from brand identity, that only a well-defined identity allows you to precisely define your position.

I agree with Kapferer's principle, but I think his sequencing is misleading. It implies you do identity work first and positioning work second, as though one is an input and the other an output. In practice, the process of working out what you want to mean to people is part of working out who you are. They develop together. Positioning without identity is a claim you can't sustain. Identity without positioning is self-knowledge that never faces the market.

Kevin Lane Keller came closest to something I believe strongly when he wrote that good positioning has a foot in the present and a foot in the future. Positioning isn't a description of what you do today. It's a decision about who you're becoming. That makes it an identity decision with a market-facing consequence.

Proposition informs positioning, but positioning also shapes proposition

This is a nuance I think most frameworks miss. Proposition tells you what you're offering, what value it delivers and how it makes someone's life easier. Positioning tells you why you, why you're different and what you want to be known for. You need to understand your proposition before you can define meaningful difference. I need to know the "what" before I can help a client articulate the "why you."

The mistake is treating them as sequential. A business that defines its proposition in isolation and then tries to extract positioning from it will often end up with positioning that's functional rather than meaningful. "We offer faster implementation than competitors" is proposition. "We exist because complex businesses deserve clarity, not more complexity" is positioning. The second one shapes which propositions you develop, not just the other way around.

They're interdependent. Pull one and the other moves.

The process matters more than the statement

Here's something I've learned the hard way over twenty years of doing this work. The real value of positioning isn't the beautifully written statement you present at the end. It's what happens in the room on the way there.

The process of arriving at a position forces a leadership team to confront things they've been avoiding. It reveals misalignment they'd been papering over. It surfaces the gap between what they believe they deliver and what their customers actually experience. It forces choices. Real ones. The kind where you have to say no to things.

A leadership team that goes through that process properly walks out with a shared understanding of why they're different and what they want to be known for. That shared understanding is worth more than any statement because it changes how decisions get made long after the workshop is over.

The statement still matters, don't get me wrong. If a leadership team went through a brilliant process but can't articulate the result concisely, they haven't finished the work. The statement is the proof that the thinking landed. It's just not where the value lives.

And this is exactly where most companies fail. They'll invest in the strategy. They'll pay for the thinking and the process and the deliverables. What they won't invest in is embedding it, training their teams, integrating it into how the business actually operates day to day. That's where positioning goes to die. Not in the definition, but in the adoption.

Why this has never been more urgent

In 2025, AI-generated content surpassed human-written content online for the first time. Research from the University of Exeter found that while AI tools can boost individual creativity, they produce what researchers called a "loss of collective novelty." Oxford and Cambridge researchers published findings in Nature showing that AI-generated content converges toward the most common outputs in its training data. Everything drifts toward the average.

A Clutch study found that 59% of consumers identified generic or robotic messaging as one of the fastest trust killers for brands. Raptive's research showed that suspected AI content reduces reader trust by nearly 50%.

This is the part that should worry every CEO and CMO reading this. AI is a conformity engine. It gives every business the ability to produce vast quantities of content that sounds exactly like everyone else. If you don't have clear positioning, you can't brief AI properly. And AI without a brief defaults to average. Your website copy, your LinkedIn posts, your pitch decks, your sales emails. All of it competent, polished and completely indistinguishable from the business next door.

We're approaching a world of vanilla. Fast.

The businesses that will cut through aren't the ones using better AI tools. They're the ones that know what they stand for clearly enough to tell the tools what to say. That requires positioning. Real positioning. Not a statement buried in a brand guidelines document nobody reads, but a genuinely held understanding of why you exist, why you're different and what you want to mean to the people you're trying to reach.

The test

If you're a CEO or CMO reading this and wondering whether you actually have a positioning problem, here's the simplest diagnostic I know.

Ask your leadership team, independently and without conferring, to answer one question: why should a client choose us over the alternatives? If they give you the same answer, concisely and with conviction, you're in better shape than most. If they give you five different answers or one long rambling one, you don't have a positioning problem. You have an identity problem. And everything you're building on top of it is working harder than it needs to.