Positioning Maps: Draw the Right Picture or Draw the Wrong Conclusions

A positioning map is a two-axis visual framework that plots your brand, and your competitors, across two dimensions that matter to buyers. Done well, it shows you where the market is crowded, where it is open, and whether the space you think you own is the space customers actually see you in. Done poorly, it is a slide that makes everyone in the room feel good about a position you have not actually earned.

The difference between those two outcomes usually comes down to one thing: whether the axes reflect what buyers genuinely use to make decisions, or what your internal team finds most flattering.

What Is a Positioning Map and Why Do Marketers Get It Wrong?

The positioning map, sometimes called a perceptual map, has been a staple of marketing strategy for decades. The concept is simple: pick two dimensions, plot the competitive set, and see what the landscape looks like. In practice, it is one of the most frequently misused tools in the strategy kit.

The misuse almost always starts with axis selection. Teams tend to choose dimensions that are easy to measure internally, like price and product breadth, rather than dimensions that reflect how buyers actually evaluate options. The result is a map that accurately describes the competitive set from a product perspective but tells you almost nothing about how the market perceives any of those brands.

I have sat in enough strategy sessions to know what this looks like in practice. The map goes up on the screen. Someone points to the top-right quadrant and says “that is where we want to be.” Someone else points to a gap between two competitors and calls it a white space opportunity. The room nods. The slide moves to the appendix. Three months later, nothing has changed in the market because the map was built on internal logic, not customer reality.

That is not a positioning map. That is a comfort exercise with a grid drawn around it.

The Two Types of Positioning Map (and Why the Distinction Matters)

There are two meaningfully different versions of this tool, and treating them as interchangeable is where most teams go wrong.

The first is a competitive positioning map. This plots brands across dimensions chosen by the marketing team, usually based on product attributes, price points, or channel presence. It is built from internal data and secondary research. It is useful for understanding how the competitive set is structured, but it reflects how the company sees the market, not how buyers see it.

The second is a perceptual map. This is built from customer research, often through surveys or qualitative interviews, and plots how buyers actually perceive brands relative to each other. The axes emerge from the data rather than being imposed in advance. This version is harder to build, takes longer, and requires genuine investment in customer insight. It is also significantly more useful.

The practical difference is this: a competitive map tells you where you have positioned yourself. A perceptual map tells you where you have landed. Those two things are often not the same place, and the gap between them is where positioning problems live.

Positioning strategy sits within a broader set of go-to-market decisions, from pricing architecture to channel selection to growth sequencing. If you want to understand how positioning fits into that wider picture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full framework.

How to Choose Axes That Actually Mean Something

Axis selection is the most consequential decision in building a positioning map. Get it right and the map becomes a genuine strategic input. Get it wrong and you have produced an expensive piece of decoration.

The test for any axis is straightforward: does this dimension influence how buyers choose between options in this category? Not how your product team ranks features. Not how your sales team describes the value proposition. How buyers actually decide.

Common axis pairs that tend to produce useful maps include price versus quality perception, specialisation versus breadth, accessibility versus exclusivity, and traditional versus progressive brand character. The specific pair you choose should be driven by your category dynamics, not borrowed from a template.

A few practical rules worth following:

• The two axes should be independent of each other. If one axis predicts the other, you have not created a two-dimensional map, you have created a diagonal line with extra steps.
• Both axes should have genuine variance across the competitive set. If every competitor clusters in the same quadrant, the axis is not discriminating between them in any useful way.
• At least one axis should be validated by customer input, not just internal assumption. Even a handful of buyer interviews can prevent the most common errors in axis selection.

When I was building positioning frameworks for clients across industries ranging from financial services to consumer goods, the axis selection conversation was almost always the most revealing part of the process. It forced teams to articulate what they actually believed buyers cared about, and then defend that belief with evidence. That conversation alone was often worth more than the finished map.

White Space Is Not the Same as Opportunity

One of the most persistent myths around positioning maps is that an empty quadrant represents an untapped market opportunity. It might. It might also represent a position that no competitor has occupied because no customer wants it.

The distinction matters enormously. Moving into white space that exists because of genuine unmet demand is a growth strategy. Moving into white space that exists because the market has already decided it is not a viable position is an expensive way to learn something your competitors already knew.

Before treating any gap on a positioning map as an opportunity, ask three questions. First, do buyers in this category actually value the combination of attributes this position represents? Second, is there a reason no competitor has moved here, and have you actually investigated that reason? Third, can your business credibly occupy this position given your current assets, capabilities, and reputation?

The third question is the one teams most frequently skip. Positioning is not just about where you want to be. It is about where you can be, given what you are starting from. A mid-market brand cannot simply decide to occupy the premium quadrant by updating its website and raising its prices. The position has to be earned across every customer touchpoint, and that takes time, consistency, and usually significant investment.

Understanding where market penetration fits in your growth model is relevant here. White space positioning and penetration strategy are different bets, and conflating them produces plans that are neither one thing nor the other.

How to Build a Positioning Map That Is Worth Using

The process is not complicated, but it requires discipline at each stage.

Step one: define the competitive set. Be deliberate about who you include. The instinct is to map only the brands you consider direct competitors. But buyers often evaluate options across a broader set, including substitutes and alternatives that do not look like direct competitors from the inside. Map the set as buyers experience it, not as your sales team defines it.

Step two: identify candidate dimensions through customer input. Run a series of buyer interviews or a structured survey asking customers to describe how they chose between options in your category. The language they use, and the criteria they cite, will tell you what the axes of your map should be. This does not need to be a large research programme. Even ten to fifteen interviews with real buyers will surface the patterns that matter.

Step three: select two axes that are independent, buyer-validated, and discriminating. Apply the rules described above. If you cannot agree on the axes, that disagreement is itself a signal worth paying attention to. It usually means the team has not aligned on what the brand actually stands for.

Step four: plot the competitive set honestly. This is where internal bias tends to creep in. Teams have a natural tendency to place their own brand more favourably than the evidence supports. If you have customer data, use it to calibrate where you actually sit. If you do not, be conservative. An honest map that shows you in a difficult position is more useful than a flattering map that gives you false confidence.

Step five: interpret the map as a diagnostic, not a conclusion. The map should generate questions, not answers. Where are we clustered with competitors in ways that make differentiation difficult? Where do customers perceive us differently from how we perceive ourselves? What positions are theoretically available and genuinely viable given our current assets?

At Cybercom, early in my tenure there, we went through a positioning exercise that was uncomfortable because the honest version of the map showed us clustered with half a dozen other mid-size digital agencies in a space where nobody had a clear point of difference. The instinct in the room was to redraw the axes until we looked better. We did not do that. Instead, we used the map as a brief for what we needed to build, and that led directly to the decision to develop SEO as a high-margin specialisation and position ourselves as a European hub with genuine multilingual capability. That was a real differentiator. The map did not give us the answer, but it made the question unavoidable.

Positioning Maps in Practice: Common Failure Modes

Beyond axis selection and white space mythology, there are a handful of other failure modes worth naming directly.

Building the map once and treating it as permanent. Markets move. Competitors reposition. New entrants arrive. A positioning map built eighteen months ago may not reflect the competitive landscape you are operating in today. The map should be a living document, revisited at meaningful intervals, not a slide that gets filed after the strategy offsite.

Mapping attributes instead of perceptions. There is a difference between what your product does and what buyers believe it does. A brand can have objectively superior performance on a given dimension and still be perceived as inferior to a competitor that has communicated more effectively. The map should reflect perception, because perception is what drives choice.

Using the map to validate a decision already made. This is the most insidious version. The positioning has already been decided by the leadership team. The map is built afterwards to justify it. Everyone in the room knows this is what is happening, but nobody says it. The map becomes a prop rather than a tool. If you find yourself in this situation, the honest thing to do is to say so and push back on the process. A positioning map that exists to confirm a conclusion is not a strategic input. It is a slide.

Ignoring the operational implications of a repositioning move. Deciding to move from one quadrant to another is not a communications decision. It is a business decision. It affects product development, pricing, hiring, channel strategy, and customer experience. A map can show you where you want to go. It cannot do the work of getting there, and teams that treat repositioning as a branding exercise without addressing the underlying operational requirements almost always fail to move.

For context on how positioning connects to broader revenue and pipeline thinking, Vidyard’s research on GTM team pipeline is worth reviewing. The connection between where you are positioned and what pipeline you can realistically generate is more direct than most positioning frameworks acknowledge.

When a Positioning Map Is Most Useful

Positioning maps are not universally applicable. There are moments when they add genuine value and moments when they are the wrong tool for the problem.

They are most useful at category entry, when you are mapping a competitive landscape for the first time and need to understand where the structural opportunities lie. They are valuable at inflection points, when a business is considering a repositioning move and needs to understand the distance between its current position and its target. They are useful in competitive review cycles, when new entrants or competitor moves have shifted the landscape and you need to understand where you now sit relative to the changed set.

They are less useful as a substitute for customer research, as a way to settle internal disagreements about brand direction, or as a device for making a predetermined position look strategically inevitable.

The BCG work on brand strategy and go-to-market alignment makes a relevant point about the relationship between brand positioning and organisational capability. You cannot position your way to a capability you do not have. The map should inform what you build, not substitute for building it.

Similarly, BCG’s analysis of pricing and go-to-market strategy is a useful reminder that price positioning is not simply a number. It is a signal that shapes perception across every other dimension of how buyers evaluate your brand. Where you sit on a price axis has implications that run through the entire positioning map.

What a Good Positioning Map Should Produce

The output of a well-constructed positioning map should not be a finished strategy. It should be a sharper brief.

Specifically, it should produce clarity on three things. First, where you currently sit in the minds of buyers, based on evidence rather than aspiration. Second, where the viable strategic options are, given the competitive landscape, your current assets, and the dimensions buyers actually use to choose. Third, what the gap is between your current position and your target position, and therefore what the work of getting there actually involves.

That third output is the one most often missing. Teams spend significant time building the map and almost no time quantifying what it would take to move. The map shows the destination. The harder question is the route, the timeline, and the investment required to make the move credible rather than aspirational.

When I was growing a team from around twenty people to close to a hundred, positioning was not just an external exercise. We were also positioning internally within a global network of offices, competing for resource allocation, talent, and client referrals. The same principles applied. We mapped where we sat relative to peer offices on dimensions the network leadership actually used to allocate work, not the dimensions we wished they used. That honest assessment drove the decisions about where to invest, what capabilities to build, and how to communicate our value internally. The map was uncomfortable. The decisions it produced were the right ones.

If you want to go deeper on how positioning maps connect to the broader mechanics of go-to-market planning, growth sequencing, and market entry strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers those topics in full.

Growth hacking frameworks, which often treat positioning as a secondary concern, frequently run into the same problem from a different direction. Semrush’s breakdown of growth hacking examples is worth reading alongside a positioning exercise, because the tactics that work in a growth context are almost always position-dependent. What works for a brand in the premium quadrant will not work for a challenger brand in the same category.

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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