Market Positioning Process: How to Stop Competing and Start Owning

A market positioning process is the structured sequence a business uses to define where it sits in the competitive landscape, what it stands for, and why a specific customer should choose it over everything else available. Done well, it shapes every downstream marketing decision. Done poorly, it produces a positioning statement that lives in a deck and influences nothing.

Most companies skip the process entirely and go straight to messaging. That is why so many brands sound identical to their competitors, compete on price by default, and struggle to explain in plain language what actually makes them different.

Why Most Positioning Work Fails Before It Starts

I have sat in a lot of positioning workshops. I have run some of them. And the most common failure mode is not a lack of creativity or strategic thinking. It is that the process begins in the wrong place.

Teams typically start by asking: what do we want to say about ourselves? That is an internal question. Positioning is an external discipline. It is about where you sit in the mind of a specific customer, relative to the alternatives they are actually weighing up, not the competitors you have decided to benchmark against.

When I was running an agency and we were working through our own positioning, the instinct was to look left and right at other agencies and find the gap. The problem was that our clients were not choosing between agencies in the way we imagined. They were often choosing between hiring an agency, hiring in-house, or doing nothing. Those are completely different competitive sets, and each one requires a different positioning response.

Getting the competitive frame right is the first and most important step. Everything else flows from it.

This article is part of a broader body of work on go-to-market and growth strategy, where positioning sits as a foundational input rather than a standalone exercise.

What Does a Market Positioning Process Actually Involve?

There is no single canonical process. Different frameworks exist, and most of them are useful in parts. What matters is the sequence of questions you answer, not the template you use to answer them.

A rigorous positioning process works through six distinct areas:

Step One: Define the Market You Are Actually In

This sounds obvious. It is not. The market you think you are in and the market your customer thinks you are in are often different things, and that gap matters enormously.

A project management software company might define its market as “project management tools.” But its customers might define their problem as “we waste too much time in status meetings.” Those two framings lead to completely different positioning decisions. One positions against Asana and Monday. The other positions against bad meeting culture, which is a much more compelling and differentiated place to stand.

The practical work here involves talking to customers, not surveying them. Surveys tell you what people think they think. Conversations tell you what they actually experience. Ask them to describe the moment they realised they had the problem your product solves. Ask them what they tried before. Ask them what they would do if your product disappeared tomorrow. Those answers define the real market.

This is also where you identify the true competitive alternatives. For many B2B products, the most common alternative is a spreadsheet or a manual process, not a direct competitor. If you are positioning against Salesforce when your real competition is Excel, you are fighting the wrong battle.

Step Two: Segment the Market and Choose Your Customer

Positioning for everyone is positioning for no one. This is one of those statements that sounds like a cliché until you have watched a company try to be all things to all buyers and end up owning nothing.

Segmentation in the context of positioning is not about demographics or firmographics alone. It is about finding the cluster of customers for whom your specific combination of strengths is most valuable. That requires understanding not just who they are, but what they care about most, what trade-offs they are willing to make, and what they find genuinely frustrating about the current options available to them.

I spent a period working across more than 30 industries, managing significant ad spend across client portfolios that ranged from retail to financial services to healthcare. One pattern that repeated itself was that the clients who had done the work to choose a specific customer, and then built everything around serving that customer exceptionally well, consistently outperformed those who had kept their targeting deliberately broad to “not leave money on the table.” Breadth felt safe. It was not. It just spread the mediocrity further.

Choose the segment where you have the most credible right to win. Not the largest segment. Not the most aspirational segment. The one where your genuine strengths create the most meaningful difference for the customer.

Step Three: Identify What You Can Genuinely Claim

This is where a lot of positioning work gets dishonest, not deliberately, but because the people doing it are too close to the product. They list features as differentiators. They describe capabilities that competitors also have. They claim “quality” and “service” as if those are positions rather than table stakes.

A genuine differentiator has three properties: it is true, it is valued by the target customer, and it is not easily claimed by competitors. All three conditions need to be met. Two out of three is not positioning. It is marketing copy.

The test I use is simple: can a competitor say the same thing without lying? If the answer is yes, it is not a differentiator. “We put our clients first” fails this test immediately. “We are the only platform that integrates directly with legacy NHS systems without a middleware layer” passes it, assuming that is true.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, the entries that stood out were not the ones with the most polished creative. They were the ones where you could feel a clear, honest differentiator underneath the work. The strategy was doing the heavy lifting, and the creative was expressing something real. The entries that fell flat were usually trying to make something ordinary sound extraordinary. That tension is always visible.

This stage also requires honesty about weaknesses. Understanding what you cannot credibly claim is as important as understanding what you can. It prevents you from positioning into a space where a competitor can easily expose you.

Step Four: Map the Competitive Landscape Honestly

Competitive analysis for positioning purposes is different from a standard competitive audit. You are not cataloguing features. You are mapping perceptions. Specifically, you are trying to understand what positions are already occupied in the minds of your target customers, and where the credible white space is.

The classic two-by-two perceptual map is a useful tool here, not because it gives you the answer, but because the process of building it forces you to make explicit choices about which dimensions actually matter to customers. Price versus quality is the lazy default. The more useful axes are the ones that reflect the real trade-offs your customers are making.

For a B2B software company, the relevant axes might be implementation complexity versus depth of customisation. For a professional services firm, they might be sector specialism versus breadth of capability. The right axes are the ones your customers use to make decisions, not the ones that make your product look best.

Understanding how market penetration dynamics interact with positioning choices is also worth considering at this stage. A market where one or two players already dominate requires a different positioning approach than a fragmented market where no clear leader has emerged.

Step Five: Write the Positioning Statement, Then Test It

A positioning statement is an internal strategic document. It is not customer-facing copy. Its purpose is to align the organisation around a clear, specific strategic choice so that every downstream decision, from product development to pricing to channel selection, is made in service of the same position.

The classic Geoffrey Moore format remains useful: “For [target customer] who [has this problem], [product name] is a [market category] that [key benefit]. Unlike [competitive alternative], [product name] [key differentiator].”

The format matters less than the discipline of completing it honestly. The danger is writing a positioning statement that sounds good internally but cannot survive contact with a real customer. Testing it means taking the core claims, not the statement itself, into customer conversations and watching what happens. Do they nod? Do they push back? Do they say “yes, but my real problem is actually…”? Each of those responses is valuable data.

One of the more uncomfortable truths about positioning work is that the statement you arrive at after genuine customer testing often looks quite different from the one you started with. That discomfort is the process working correctly. If your positioning statement survives customer testing unchanged, you probably did not test it hard enough.

The relationship between positioning and go-to-market execution is tighter than most teams acknowledge. If you are building out your growth strategy and have not locked down your positioning first, you are making channel and messaging decisions without a foundation. More on that thinking is available across the growth strategy hub.

Step Six: Translate Positioning Into Execution

This is where most positioning work either earns its keep or quietly gets forgotten. A positioning statement that does not change how the company behaves, prices, sells, and communicates has done nothing. It is a strategy that exists only on paper.

Translation into execution means making the positioning real across four areas:

Messaging: Every customer-facing communication should be traceable back to the positioning. Not in a formulaic way, but in the sense that the same underlying idea is expressed consistently across channels, audiences, and formats. Inconsistency in messaging is usually a symptom of unclear positioning, not a creative problem.

Pricing: Positioning and pricing are inseparable. A premium positioning claim is immediately undermined by a price point that signals commodity. BCG’s work on go-to-market pricing strategy makes this point clearly: pricing is a positioning signal before it is a revenue mechanism. If your price does not match your claimed position, customers will trust the price.

Channel selection: Where you show up is part of your positioning. A brand that claims to be a premium, high-trust provider but runs aggressive retargeting campaigns on every platform is sending a contradictory signal. Channel choices should reinforce the position, not undermine it.

Sales and customer success: Positioning lives or dies in the sales conversation. If the sales team is pitching something different from what marketing is positioning, customers will notice the gap. Getting sales aligned on the positioning, and giving them the language to express it naturally, is not a nice-to-have. It is essential.

The Relationship Between Positioning and Growth

There is a version of positioning work that is purely defensive. You do it to protect margin, to reduce price sensitivity, to retain customers who might otherwise leave. That is legitimate and often undervalued.

But positioning also drives growth, and not just through better conversion rates on existing demand. A clear, differentiated position makes it easier to reach new audiences, because you have something specific to say. Vague positioning produces vague marketing, which produces vague results. When I look back at the periods where agencies I worked with grew fastest, they were almost always periods where the positioning was unusually clear, not unusually creative.

Earlier in my career I was probably too focused on lower-funnel performance metrics, optimising for the customers who were already close to buying. The problem with that approach is that it captures existing demand without creating new demand. Positioning is one of the primary mechanisms through which you create new demand, by making your category and your specific place within it legible to people who were not previously considering you. That requires clarity, not just reach.

This is also why positioning cannot be treated as a one-time exercise. Markets shift. Competitors move. Customer priorities evolve. A position that was genuinely differentiated three years ago may now be table stakes. The increasing difficulty of go-to-market execution is partly a function of markets becoming more crowded, which means positions that were once distinctive get eroded faster than they used to.

Building a process for revisiting positioning, not just setting it, is one of the more mature things a marketing organisation can do.

What Good Positioning Actually Looks Like in Practice

Good positioning is felt before it is read. When a brand has genuinely clear positioning, everything about the experience of encountering it, the website, the sales conversation, the pricing, the product itself, feels coherent. There is no gap between what is claimed and what is delivered.

The companies I have seen grow most sustainably over time were not necessarily the ones with the best marketing. They were the ones where the positioning was honest enough that the product could actually live up to it. Marketing that overpromises what the product delivers creates short-term acquisition at the cost of long-term trust. That is a bad trade.

I have a view that if a company genuinely delighted customers at every touchpoint, marketing would be a multiplier rather than a prop. Positioning is part of what makes that possible. When the position is honest, the product team knows what to build toward. The customer success team knows what to deliver. The sales team knows what to promise. Alignment is not a cultural aspiration. It is a commercial outcome of good positioning.

Sectors that have historically struggled with this include healthcare and professional services, where positioning often defaults to credentials rather than outcomes. Forrester’s analysis of healthcare go-to-market challenges reflects a broader pattern: when positioning is built around what the provider values rather than what the customer values, the gap between the two creates friction that marketing cannot resolve.

The fix is not better messaging. It is better positioning work upstream.

Common Mistakes That Undermine the Process

A few patterns come up repeatedly, across industries and company sizes:

Positioning by committee: The more people involved in writing a positioning statement, the more it tends toward the inoffensive and the generic. Good positioning requires someone with authority to make a specific, exclusive choice and hold it against internal pressure to broaden it. That requires leadership, not consensus.

Confusing positioning with brand values: Brand values are internal cultural commitments. Positioning is an external competitive claim. They are related but not the same. “We are honest, bold, and curious” is not a positioning statement. It is a values statement. The market does not care about your values until it has a reason to believe your positioning.

Treating positioning as a marketing department responsibility: Positioning decisions affect product, sales, pricing, and customer success. When it is owned exclusively by marketing, the other functions do not feel bound by it, and the position exists only in marketing materials rather than in the actual customer experience.

Skipping the customer research: This is the most common shortcut and the most damaging one. Internal teams have strong views about what makes their product valuable. Those views are often partially right and partially self-serving. Only customer research can tell you which parts are which. Positioning built entirely on internal assumptions tends to emphasise the features the team is most proud of rather than the outcomes the customer most values.

For teams thinking about how positioning connects to broader growth mechanics, including channel strategy, audience development, and scaling, the examples of growth strategy in practice from Semrush offer a useful reference point for how positioning choices play out in execution.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions