The specific place a brand occupies in a customer's mind relative to competitors — the deliberate answer to "what is this, for whom, and why does it matter compared to the alternatives."
Why it matters
Positioning is the strategic foundation everything else in brand and messaging is built on. Without a clear position, a brand tends to describe itself in ways that could apply to any competitor, which makes it hard for a prospective customer to understand why they should choose it specifically.
In a sentence
"Our positioning is deliberately 'self-serve, for teams too small for enterprise tools' — that single sentence rules out a lot of messaging that would otherwise sound generic."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Brand voice (positioning is the strategic claim about what a brand is and who it's for; voice is how that brand sounds when it communicates — two brands could have identical positioning and completely different voices).
- Synonyms: Market positioning, competitive positioning.