What is Positioning?

Where the concept came from, why it's changed over the years, and how I define it now.

There are a handful of words in tech that get said so often they risk losing their meaning. Strategy. Go-to-Market. Alignment. And “positioning” sits pretty near the top of this list.

Founders talk about it in podcasts. Sales leaders blame it when deals don’t convert. Marketers riff about it when they want to launch a new brand campaign. It gets used to mean the tagline, the category, the pitch, the brand, or simply “the way we talk about ourselves”.

But if you’re a product marketer who cares about the craft, you know positioning is a real thing. A defined piece of work, with a real definition and processes to follow - and real consequences when it’s done badly.

I wrote last year about how to run a positioning process properly. This week I want to answer the more fundamental question: what even is positioning? We’ll walk through two definitions that helped build the concept, and then the way I’ve come to see it, as a statement of strategy you never fully control, one that keeps shifting as the market moves beneath it.

Where it started

I’m a self-taught marketer. I didn’t study marketing at university (I was a history and politics student - not sure what that was supposed to lead to...) But I do know that the idea of positioning didn’t start with software or SaaS. It comes from the mythical pre-internet world. It started in advertising. So let’s dig into that a bit. (Ok maybe the history degree was useful?)

Jack Trout first wrote about positioning in 1969, in a trade magazine article about winning in a “me-too” marketplace. He and Al Ries developed the idea through the 1970s before publishing Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind in 1981, still one of the most influential marketing books ever written.

Their definition is this:

“Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.”

This was the era of Avis (”We’re number two. We try harder.”) and 7UP (”The Uncola”). Consumers were drowning in advertising, and Ries and Trout argued the only way to cut through was to occupy a single, clear position in the prospect’s mind, usually defined relative to the leader in your category.

It holds up remarkably well. The core insight, that positioning lives in your buyer’s head rather than in your product, is still a principle that rings true for any product marketer, regardless of industry.

You don’t get to simply declare what you are and have the market accept it. The market already has a landscape of products in its mind, crowded with competitors, and your job is to work out where you fit in it and what you can credibly own.

This was a groundbreaking idea in an era where shouting the loudest and spending the most was the conventional wisdom.

How software changed it

The Ries and Trout worldview assumed a fairly stable set of categories. Soft drinks, cars, painkillers. Software changed that. Now, new categories appear (and vanish) all the time. Products change every quarter. Buyers spend months researching dozens of near-identical alternatives before they speak to a salesperson.

The arrival of SaaS and the explosion of B2B tech changed the game. Suddenly there were thousands of products solving problems customers didn’t yet have language for, in categories that didn’t exist a year earlier. That’s roughly the moment product marketing became a real job, and people like me became employable. When your product is complex and the category is unclear, someone has to make the market understand what you are. That someone is usually a PMM.

The best modern definition of positioning - in my opinion - comes from April Dunford, whose book Obviously Awesome reframed positioning for this new world:

“Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.”

Dunford describes it as context-setting for your product. Her analogy is the opening scene of a film. Before you can follow the plot, you need to know where you are, what year it is, and who these people are. Positioning does the same job for a product. Get the context right and customers understand you instantly. Get it wrong and even a brilliant product looks confusing.

I like that the word “deliberately” is in there. In Dunford’s world, positioning stops being an advertising trick and becomes a strategic exercise: choosing your competitive alternatives, your differentiation, your target market, and accepting the trade-offs that come with those choices.

How I think about it

Both definitions are excellent, and I refer to them regularly. But after years of doing this work in-house and now across consulting clients, I’ve landed on my own way of thinking about it. And it starts one level up from the product.

Most definitions treat positioning as something you do to a product. Find the best way to frame it, set the context, place it in the right category. That’s all true. But, for me, positioning is really the practical expression of your company’s strategy. The decisions underneath it - who you’re for, what you’re best at, what you’re deliberately not going to do - are strategic choices, not marketing ones. Positioning is where that strategy becomes a claim the market can understand.

So here’s the definition I use:

Positioning is how you turn your company’s strategy into a claim about your place in the market: one that’s true, compelling, and never finished.

Four ideas are touched on in this sentence.

Strategy. Positioning isn’t a copywriting task. It is based on hard commercial choices: the segment you’re going to win, the alternatives you plan to beat, the one or two things you want to be known for, and the value you create that others don’t. Pinning those down is the hard work. Get them clear and the claim almost writes itself. It’s also why I think a product marketer, rather than a brand team, is usually best placed to drive positioning. It sits at the point between the product, the market and the commercial reality of the business.

True. Whatever you claim has to hold up the moment a buyer uses the product. Positioning that oversells opens a gap between the promise and the experience, and buyers feel that gap straight away. This is the part that keeps you honest. It’s also why you never fully control your positioning. Your market, your competitors and your customers all influence your claim.

Compelling. ‘True but dull’ is just as a bad as claim that’s delusional. The claim also has to matter to the people you’re selling to, and pull them towards where your company is heading. This is the ambition side. Positioning lives in the space between how your product is seen today and how you want it to be seen tomorrow. Pure reality is unambitious. Pure aspiration is fiction. The trick is finding the point that’s both true and compelling at the same time.

Never finished, because positioning moves as the world underneath it moves:

• The facts change. Markets shift, categories mature, the ground you’re standing on isn’t fixed - especially with the change AI is driving.

• Your competition changes. They get better, or they get worse, and either way your relative position moves.

• Your customer changes. The type of company or buyer you’re going after evolves, and so does what they care about.

• Your product changes. New capabilities mean a new value proposition, and the reason people buy you shifts with it.

• You change. Get stronger at brand building or develop a sharper sales motion, and that becomes a factor you can lean on.

Positioning has to reflect both the now and the future. It’s a living, breathing thing, not something you lock in for years.

Why it matters

When positioning is strong, everything downstream gets easier. Messaging sharpens because you know exactly what you’re claiming and for whom. Sales conversations improve because the pitch matches the claim you’re making on your website. Product decisions get clearer because everyone understands what the product is and isn’t. Pricing, packaging, onboarding and GTM all have a reference point.

When it’s weak, you can really feel it. Sales pitch one story, marketing tells another, product builds something different entirely. And customers are left to work out for themselves what you do and why they should care.

Where it goes wrong

The most common failure I see in consulting work is companies that don’t really have positioning at all. They’ve never made the deliberate choices, so there’s a clear absence of it. Teams pursue different strategies, and the messaging is inconsistent.

Beyond that, there are some common mistakes:

Treating it as a tagline exercise. Positioning isn’t copy. Copy comes later, and good copy can’t rescue confused positioning.

Being for everyone. A product for everyone that solves everything usually resonates with no one. Positioning that avoids making trade-offs almost definitely won’t work.

Not being grounded in reality. This often happens when positioning sits with brand teams or founders alone. You end up describing a company that doesn’t exist yet, and buyers notice the gap.

Setting and forgetting. Positioning agreed a few years ago and never revisited, while the product, the market and the competition have all moved on.

Skipping the process. Jumping straight to messaging and GTM tactics, because positioning feels too abstract or too slow, will lead you back to the same old problems.

What to do about it

If the word “positioning” has started to lose its meaning at your company, the fix likely isn’t a better definition (though I hope this one helps). It’s doing the work.

There’s more than one good way to run the process. The traditional approach works methodically through your customers, competitors, market and product. April Dunford’s method starts from how your happiest customers already describe you, then tests and refines until it clicks. I use both, depending on the client. What matters is that it’s deliberate, rigorous, and taken seriously by leadership, and that you make the hard choices and get buy-in on the answer, so the whole company can get behind it.

And if your company’s positioning needs that kind of attention, this is a big part of what The Product Marketer consultancy does. Get in touch.

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Rory Woodbridge is a London-based consultant working with European tech companies to unlock their growth potential through world-class product marketing. Get in touch to discuss working together.