Market Positioning Chart: How to Find the Space Your Competitors Left Open

A market positioning chart is a two-axis visual map that plots your brand and your competitors across two dimensions that matter to buyers, revealing where the market is crowded, where it is open, and where your positioning should live. Done properly, it turns a strategic conversation that usually runs in circles into something concrete enough to act on.

The chart itself is simple. What makes it useful is the thinking that goes into choosing the right axes, placing brands honestly, and then drawing the right conclusions from what you see.

What Is a Market Positioning Chart and Why Does It Matter?

A market positioning chart, sometimes called a perceptual map, is a strategic tool that places competing brands on a grid defined by two attributes that buyers use to evaluate options. The horizontal and vertical axes each represent a spectrum, and every brand in the competitive set gets plotted based on where it sits across both dimensions.

The point is not the visual. The point is what the visual forces you to confront. When you plot a market honestly, you almost always find that most brands have gravitated toward the same corner of the chart. They have all chased the same perceived safe ground, the same buyer signals, the same category conventions. The spaces they have left open are often significant.

I have run this exercise dozens of times across categories as different as financial services, FMCG, SaaS, and professional services. The pattern is remarkably consistent. Brands cluster. The clustering is not accidental. It happens because every brand in a category is watching the same competitors, listening to the same customer feedback, and drawing the same conclusions. The result is a market where differentiation is claimed in brand language but invisible on the chart.

That is where the chart earns its place. It makes the invisible visible. And once you can see the open space, the strategic question shifts from “how do we differentiate?” to “do we have the capability and appetite to own that territory?”

If you are thinking about how this fits into a broader go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the full strategic picture, from market entry to growth architecture.

How Do You Choose the Right Axes for a Positioning Chart?

This is where most positioning exercises go wrong. Teams default to axes that feel safe and obvious, usually some version of “premium vs. affordable” on one axis and “traditional vs. modern” on the other. These axes are not wrong, but they are rarely the ones that explain how buyers actually choose.

The right axes come from buyer research, not from internal brainstorming. Specifically, they come from understanding the decision criteria that buyers use when they are evaluating options in your category, particularly the criteria that create the most tension or trade-off. If buyers consistently say they have to choose between speed and thoroughness, those are your axes. If they say they have to choose between specialist expertise and breadth of service, those are your axes.

A few principles that have served me well when selecting axes:

Both axes must be meaningful to buyers, not to you. The attributes need to reflect how buyers evaluate options, not how you wish they would. I have sat in too many workshops where the axes were chosen because they made the client’s brand look good. That is not positioning strategy. That is confirmation bias with a marker pen.

The axes should create genuine tension. If every brand can plausibly claim the positive end of both axes, the axes are too soft. Good axes reveal trade-offs. They should make it genuinely difficult for any single brand to own both extremes simultaneously.

Run multiple versions. A single chart gives you one perspective. Running the exercise with three or four different axis combinations usually reveals which dimensions are actually doing the strategic work. The chart that produces the most interesting conversation is usually the most useful one.

Test your placement with external data. Once you have chosen your axes and plotted the brands, check your placements against something external, whether that is customer survey data, review sentiment, or third-party research. Internal teams are reliably poor at placing their own brand objectively. The whole value of the exercise depends on honest placement.

How Do You Build a Market Positioning Chart Step by Step?

The mechanics are straightforward. The discipline required to do it properly is less so.

Step 1: Define your competitive set. This is not just your direct competitors. It includes any alternative a buyer might consider when solving the problem your brand addresses. For a B2B SaaS tool, that might include spreadsheets and manual processes, not just rival platforms. Narrow your competitive set too early and you miss the real picture.

Step 2: Gather buyer perception data. Survey customers and prospects. Ask them how they would describe each brand in the competitive set across the attributes you are considering. Look at review platforms, social listening, and sales call transcripts. You want buyer perception, not brand intent.

Step 3: Choose your axes. Based on the research, identify the two dimensions that most influence buying decisions and create the most meaningful differentiation in the category. Draw your grid with clearly labelled extremes on each axis.

Step 4: Plot the brands. Place each competitor on the chart based on buyer perception data, not on their own marketing claims. Where do buyers actually perceive them to sit? This step requires honesty. If your brand is perceived as mid-market despite your premium ambitions, it goes in the mid-market position on the chart.

Step 5: Identify the white space. Look for areas of the chart with little or no brand presence. These are your positioning opportunities. But do not assume that empty space is automatically attractive. Ask why it is empty. Sometimes it is empty because no buyer need exists there. Sometimes it is empty because it is genuinely underserved.

Step 6: Test the opportunity against your capabilities. Can your business credibly own that territory? Positioning is a promise. If you cannot deliver on it operationally, you should not make it. I have seen brands claim positioning that their product, pricing, and service model could not support. The market finds out quickly.

Step 7: Pressure-test with a second chart. Run the same exercise with different axes. Does the white space hold up? Does your chosen position look defensible from multiple angles? If it only looks good from one perspective, it is probably fragile.

What Does a Good Positioning Chart Actually Reveal?

The most useful thing a positioning chart reveals is not where you should be. It is where everyone else has decided to be, and why.

Early in my agency career I worked on a pitch for a mid-sized financial services firm that was convinced it needed to compete on trust and heritage, the same territory every other firm in the category was claiming. When we ran the positioning chart, the cluster was extraordinary. Every significant player in the competitive set was sitting in the same quadrant. Trust and experience, top right, every single one of them. The bottom left quadrant, accessibility and simplicity, was almost completely empty.

The reason it was empty was not because no buyers wanted it. Buyers absolutely wanted it. The reason it was empty was because no established firm wanted to be seen as simple. Simple felt like a downgrade. It felt like admitting you were not sophisticated. So they all kept claiming sophistication, and a generation of buyers who found financial services intimidating had nowhere to go.

That kind of insight is what a well-constructed positioning chart delivers. Not a pretty diagram, but a commercial opportunity that the competitive dynamics have created and that everyone else has been too cautious to take.

It is also worth noting what a positioning chart does not reveal. It does not tell you whether the open space is commercially viable. It does not tell you whether your brand has the permission to move there. And it does not tell you how to execute the shift. Those are separate questions, and they require separate analysis. The chart is a starting point, not a conclusion.

What Are the Most Common Mistakes in Market Positioning Charts?

I have reviewed a lot of positioning work over the years, including during my time judging the Effie Awards, where you get to see behind the curtain of what actually drove results versus what was presented as the strategic rationale. The mistakes are remarkably consistent.

Choosing aspirational axes instead of diagnostic ones. When the axes are chosen to make the brand look differentiated rather than to reveal the true competitive landscape, the chart becomes a piece of internal communication rather than a strategic tool. It feels good in the room. It does nothing for your go-to-market strategy.

Placing your own brand based on intent rather than perception. This is the most common error. A brand that has been investing in premium positioning for three years may still be perceived as mid-market by buyers. The chart should reflect perception, not ambition. If you place yourself where you want to be rather than where you are, you are making strategy based on fiction.

Treating white space as automatically valuable. Empty quadrants are interesting, not automatically desirable. The question to ask is always: why is this space empty? Is it empty because buyers do not value that combination of attributes? Is it empty because the economics do not work? Is it empty because a brand tried and failed? Empty space that is empty for a good reason is a trap, not an opportunity.

Running the exercise once and treating it as settled. Markets move. Competitors reposition. Buyer priorities shift. A positioning chart from three years ago is likely to be misleading today. This is particularly true in categories where market dynamics shift quickly and new entrants regularly disrupt established positions. The chart needs to be a living input to strategy, not a one-time deliverable.

Confusing positioning with messaging. Positioning is a strategic choice about which part of the market you will serve and how you will be meaningfully different in that space. Messaging is how you communicate that choice. Teams frequently skip the positioning work and jump straight to messaging, then wonder why their communications feel generic. You cannot write a distinctive message for a position you have not clearly defined.

How Does Positioning Connect to Go-To-Market Strategy?

Positioning is not a branding exercise. It is a go-to-market decision with commercial consequences, and it should be treated as one.

When I was running agency growth, one of the things I noticed consistently was that the brands with the clearest positioning also had the most coherent go-to-market execution. Their channel choices made sense. Their pricing was consistent with their claimed position. Their sales conversations were aligned with their marketing. Everything pointed in the same direction because the positioning decision had been made properly at the start, not retrofitted to existing activity.

The brands without clear positioning were doing the opposite. Different channels told different stories. Pricing was inconsistent. Sales teams were improvising. Marketing was running campaigns that contradicted what the sales team was promising. The positioning chart, had they run one properly, would have revealed that they had no coherent position at all. They were trying to be everything to everyone, which in practice means being nothing distinctive to anyone.

Positioning also directly influences which audiences you target and how you reach them. If you have identified a genuine white space, you need to understand who lives in that space, what they need, and how to reach them. That is a growth strategy question, not just a marketing question. BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy makes the point that the launch and positioning decisions a brand makes early in its market entry tend to have a disproportionate effect on long-term commercial outcomes. Getting positioning right is not just strategically satisfying. It is commercially consequential.

Pricing is another direct output of positioning. Where you sit on the chart relative to competitors should directly inform your pricing architecture. BCG’s analysis of pricing in B2B markets highlights that pricing decisions are rarely made in isolation from positioning, and that misalignment between claimed position and actual price point is one of the most common sources of commercial underperformance.

One thing I have observed over many years of managing go-to-market programs across different industries: most of what performance marketing gets credited for is capturing demand that already existed. The harder and more valuable work is creating genuine demand by reaching audiences who were not already looking for you. That requires clear positioning in a space those audiences find compelling, not just better targeting of people who were already going to buy. The positioning chart helps you identify where that demand-creation opportunity actually lives.

There is a broader conversation about growth strategy worth having here. The Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers how positioning connects to channel strategy, audience development, and commercial planning, all the moving parts that need to work together for positioning to translate into actual growth.

When Should You Reposition and What Does the Chart Tell You?

Repositioning is one of the most commercially significant decisions a brand can make. It is also one of the most frequently made for the wrong reasons.

The right trigger for repositioning is a genuine shift in market dynamics: a competitor has moved into your space and eroded your differentiation, buyer priorities have shifted and your current position no longer maps to what they value, or you have identified a materially better opportunity that your capabilities can credibly support.

The wrong trigger is boredom. I have seen brands reposition because the leadership team was tired of the current positioning, because a new CMO wanted to make their mark, or because a competitor launched a campaign that looked exciting. None of these are good reasons. Repositioning has costs: customer confusion, loss of existing brand equity, internal misalignment, and the time it takes for a new position to become credible in the market.

The positioning chart helps here too. If you run the chart regularly and track how competitor positions are moving over time, you can see when your space is becoming crowded before you feel it commercially. You can also see whether the white space you identified previously is still open or whether someone else has moved into it. That kind of market intelligence is genuinely useful, and it is one of the reasons the chart should be a recurring strategic input rather than a one-time exercise.

There is also a useful discipline in asking whether repositioning is actually the answer. Sometimes brands reach for repositioning when the real problem is execution. If your positioning is sound but your product is not delivering on it, or your customer experience is inconsistent with your claimed position, the chart will not fix that. Repositioning a brand with a delivery problem just creates a bigger gap between promise and reality. I have turned around enough loss-making businesses to know that marketing is often asked to solve problems that marketing cannot solve. The positioning chart can help you see whether the issue is strategic or operational.

Tools that help you understand market dynamics, including competitive intelligence platforms, can supplement the qualitative work of positioning by giving you data on share of voice, search demand by category, and how competitor messaging is evolving. They are not a substitute for buyer research, but they add a useful quantitative layer to the picture.

How Do You Turn Positioning Insight Into Action?

The positioning chart is a diagnostic. The strategy is what you do with the diagnosis.

Once you have identified a credible positioning opportunity, the work moves into three areas. First, validating that the opportunity is commercially viable, which means testing whether buyers in that space will pay a price that works for your business model. Second, assessing whether your product, service, and operational capability can genuinely support the position you want to claim. Third, aligning your go-to-market execution so that every channel, every message, and every customer touchpoint reinforces the same position.

That third point is where most positioning strategies fall apart. The chart work gets done, the positioning statement gets written, and then execution continues largely as before because changing how a business goes to market is genuinely hard. Sales teams have existing habits. Marketing teams have existing templates. Agency partners have existing briefs. Positioning only works if it changes behaviour, not just documents.

The Forrester intelligent growth model makes a useful point about this: growth strategy requires alignment across the commercial organisation, not just a clear positioning statement. The positioning chart gives you the strategic clarity. The harder work is translating that clarity into consistent execution across every part of the business that touches the customer.

One practical discipline I have used when helping organisations move from positioning insight to execution is to test the position in a single channel or market segment before rolling it out broadly. This is not the same as a soft launch with no commitment. It means genuinely committing to the new position in a defined context, measuring the commercial response, and using that data to refine before scaling. Iterative growth approaches that test positioning in contained environments before full deployment tend to produce better commercial outcomes than organisations that try to reposition everything simultaneously.

The goal, in the end, is a position that is genuinely distinctive in the market, credible given your capabilities, and commercially valuable because it connects to something buyers actually care about. The chart helps you find it. The hard work is building the organisational alignment to hold it.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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