Rival Brands: How to Use Competition as a Positioning Tool

Rival brands are not just competitors to outspend or outlast. Used well, they are one of the sharpest positioning tools available to a strategist. The brands that understand this use their competitive landscape to define themselves with precision, rather than retreating into vague claims of quality and customer focus.

Most brand strategies treat competition as a threat to be monitored. The smarter approach is to treat rival brands as context, because positioning is always relative. What you stand for only becomes meaningful when it is measured against what others stand for.

I spent years working on competitive positioning across more than 30 industries, from retail and financial services to B2B technology and FMCG. The pattern I kept seeing was the same: brands that understood their rivals at a strategic level, not just a product or price level, consistently made sharper positioning decisions. The ones that didn’t tended to produce strategies that were technically correct but competitively invisible.

What Makes Two Brands Rivals?

The obvious answer is that rival brands compete for the same customers. But that definition is too narrow to be useful. Two brands can chase the same audience and barely be rivals at all, if they occupy genuinely different positions in the mind of that audience. Conversely, brands in different categories can function as rivals if they compete for the same budget, the same occasion, or the same emotional territory.

A more useful definition: rival brands are those whose positioning decisions directly affect your own. If their growth comes at your expense, or if their messaging creates expectations that your brand has to either meet or explicitly reject, they are rivals in the strategic sense.

This framing matters because it changes who you are paying attention to. Many brands waste significant energy benchmarking against the category leader when the real competitive threat is coming from a challenger brand that is reframing what customers expect. I have seen this play out in financial services, where legacy banks spent years tracking each other’s product features while fintech challengers were quietly redefining what a banking relationship should feel like.

If you want a broader foundation for thinking about how brand strategy connects to competitive positioning, the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub covers the full strategic framework in depth.

Why Rival Brands Are a Positioning Asset

Positioning does not happen in a vacuum. When a customer encounters your brand, they are not evaluating it against some abstract ideal. They are evaluating it against the alternatives they know. This is why rival brands are so valuable as a strategic tool: they provide the contrast that makes your own position legible.

The classic examples are well known. Apple positioned itself against the corporate rigidity of IBM and later Microsoft. Dollar Shave Club positioned itself against the premium pricing and over-engineered product theatre of Gillette. In both cases, the rival was not just a competitor to beat. It was a reference point that made the challenger’s position instantly understandable.

What those examples share is genuine strategic difference. The positioning was not manufactured. Apple’s products genuinely worked differently. Dollar Shave Club genuinely cost less and sold with less ceremony. The rival brand provided contrast, but the contrast reflected something real.

This is where many brands go wrong. They identify a rival, decide to position against it, and then construct a narrative that is not grounded in any real difference. The result is messaging that sounds bold but delivers nothing, because customers can see through positioning that is not backed by a genuine product or service reality. Wistia’s analysis of why brand-building strategies fail makes a similar point: the gap between brand promise and actual experience is where most strategies collapse.

How to Choose the Right Rival to Position Against

Not every competitor is worth positioning against, and the choice of rival matters enormously. Position against the wrong brand and you anchor yourself to the wrong audience, the wrong expectations, or the wrong conversation entirely.

There are three criteria worth applying when deciding which rival to use as a positioning reference point.

First, the rival needs to be well understood by your target audience. If your customers do not have a clear mental model of the brand you are positioning against, the contrast you are creating will not land. The reference point only works if it is already meaningful to the people you are trying to reach.

Second, the rival needs to represent a position you genuinely differ from. This sounds obvious, but I have sat in enough strategy sessions to know that brands routinely choose rivals based on market share or media spend rather than actual strategic difference. If the only meaningful difference between you and your chosen rival is price, you are not positioning, you are discounting.

Third, the rival needs to be stable enough to anchor against. Positioning against a brand that is in strategic flux, whether through acquisition, rebranding, or market exit, is a risk. I watched a challenger brand in the B2B software space spend two years building its positioning around being the anti-enterprise alternative to a specific legacy vendor. When that vendor was acquired and the acquirer repositioned it aggressively toward SMEs, the challenger’s entire positioning became incoherent almost overnight.

The Difference Between Competitive Positioning and Brand Rivalry

These two concepts are related but not identical, and conflating them leads to strategic confusion.

Competitive positioning is about how you occupy a distinct space in the market relative to all alternatives. It is primarily a strategic exercise, and it informs everything from product development to pricing to channel decisions. HubSpot’s breakdown of brand strategy components captures the relationship between positioning and the broader brand architecture well.

Brand rivalry is a more specific phenomenon. It is what happens when two brands become defined, at least in part, by their relationship to each other in the minds of customers. Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Nike and Adidas. Mac and PC. These rivalries have a life of their own that extends beyond any individual positioning decision.

The distinction matters because brand rivalries can become traps. When your identity becomes too closely tied to opposition, you lose the ability to evolve independently. Every strategic move you make gets interpreted through the lens of the rivalry, which limits your options and can make genuine innovation harder to communicate.

I have seen this happen with agency positioning, which is a category I know well. Agencies that build their entire identity around being the anti-holding-company alternative can find themselves stuck. When the holding companies start acquiring independent shops and adopting independent-sounding language, the anti-establishment position erodes. The agencies that survive that shift are the ones that were using the rivalry to clarify their own strengths, not to define themselves entirely through opposition.

When Rival Brands Raise the Whole Category

Not all brand rivalry is zero-sum. There are categories where the competition between two strong brands has grown the total market rather than just redistributing share between them.

The mechanism is straightforward. When two credible brands compete visibly in a category, they collectively generate more attention, more conversation, and more cultural relevance than either could alone. The rivalry becomes a story that media and audiences engage with, and that engagement drives category awareness and consideration.

This is one reason why challenger brands sometimes benefit from having a strong incumbent to position against. A market with a dominant, well-known player is easier to enter than a fragmented market with no clear reference points, because the incumbent has already done the work of establishing what the category is and why it matters. The challenger’s job is to offer a better answer to the question the incumbent has already made people ask.

BCG’s research on recommended brands points to something relevant here: the brands that generate the most word-of-mouth tend to be those with a clear, distinctive position. In a category with a strong rivalry, both brands can benefit from this effect if their positions are genuinely distinct.

The Risk of Mimicking a Rival

One of the most common and most damaging responses to a strong rival brand is to copy it. Not overtly, but gradually. The rival launches a new product feature, and you follow. They adopt a new tone of voice, and your brand starts to drift in the same direction. They move into a new channel, and you allocate budget to match.

This is how brands become commodities. The imitation is usually driven by fear rather than strategy, and it accelerates the moment a rival gains visible momentum. I have managed enough P&Ls to know how hard it is to hold the line on differentiation when a competitor is growing faster than you and the board is asking questions. The pressure to copy is real. But copying is almost always the wrong answer.

When you mimic a rival, you are implicitly conceding that their model is better than yours. You are also making it harder for customers to understand why they should choose you. If your product looks the same, sounds the same, and is priced similarly, the decision defaults to familiarity and distribution, which tends to favour whoever was there first.

BCG’s work on what shapes customer experience reinforces this: customers form strong preferences based on consistent, differentiated experiences. A brand that is constantly shifting to match a rival never builds the consistency that creates preference.

The more productive response to a rival gaining ground is to ask why. Is it because their positioning is genuinely stronger? Is it because they have found an audience segment you have been underserving? Is it because their product has improved in a way yours has not? The answers to those questions should inform strategy. The rival’s marketing tactics should not.

How Strong Brands Use Rivals Without Being Defined by Them

The brands that manage rivalry most effectively are the ones that use competitors as context without making them the centre of their own story. The rival is a reference point, not a protagonist.

This requires discipline. It means resisting the temptation to respond to every competitor move, to reference rivals in every piece of communication, or to let the rivalry become the primary narrative frame for your brand. The strongest brands are primarily defined by what they believe and who they serve, with the competitive context providing clarity rather than consuming attention.

When I was growing the iProspect office from a small team to one of the top five offices globally by revenue, the competitive landscape was crowded and noisy. There were larger agencies with bigger budgets, longer client relationships, and more established reputations. The temptation to define ourselves against them was constant. What actually worked was building a clear internal identity around delivery, capability, and the genuine advantage of having twenty nationalities in one office working across European markets. That was a real differentiator, not a positioning claim. The rival agencies provided context, but they did not define us.

Brand loyalty is another dimension of this. Moz’s analysis of brand loyalty points to the importance of consistent, positive experiences in building customer retention. Brands that are too focused on rivalry often neglect the existing customer relationship, which is where loyalty is actually built. The rival is a useful frame for acquisition. It is much less useful for retention.

Rival Brands in B2B: A Different Dynamic

Most of the famous examples of brand rivalry are consumer-facing, but the dynamics apply in B2B markets too, with some important differences.

In B2B, purchasing decisions involve more stakeholders, longer timelines, and more explicit evaluation criteria. The emotional contrast that drives consumer brand rivalry matters less. What matters more is the clarity of your positioning relative to alternatives, because procurement teams and buying committees are actively comparing options and looking for reasons to include or exclude vendors.

This means B2B brands need to be precise about which rivals they are positioning against and on which dimensions. A B2B software company might position against one rival on ease of implementation, against another on total cost of ownership, and against a third on the depth of a specific feature set. The positioning is more granular because the evaluation is more granular.

What does not change is the underlying principle. The rival brand provides context that makes your own position clearer. In B2B, that context is often most powerful in sales conversations and in content that helps buyers understand the category, rather than in brand advertising. But the strategic logic is the same.

One risk worth flagging in B2B is the tendency to position against rivals in ways that are visible to those rivals and invite a response. I have seen B2B brands publish comparison content that was accurate and well-intentioned, only to find that the rival updated their product within six months and the comparison became a liability. Positioning against a specific rival’s weaknesses is only durable if those weaknesses are structural rather than temporary.

When the Rivalry Becomes the Brand

There is a version of brand rivalry that goes beyond strategic positioning and becomes part of the brand’s identity. This is rarer, but when it works, it works at a level that most brand strategies never reach.

The Pepsi Challenge is the textbook example. By making the comparison explicit and public, Pepsi turned the rivalry itself into a brand asset. The challenge was not just an advertising campaign. It was a demonstration of confidence, a provocation, and a story that customers could participate in. It gave Pepsi cultural relevance that its product alone could not generate.

This kind of rivalry-as-brand-asset requires a specific set of conditions. You need to be the challenger, not the incumbent. You need a genuine product or experience advantage to demonstrate. And you need the confidence to invite the comparison publicly, which means being willing to accept that some customers will try both and still choose the rival.

Most brands do not meet all three conditions. For those that do, the payoff can be significant. But it is a high-risk play, and it requires the rest of the brand strategy to be solid enough to benefit from the attention the rivalry generates. Brand awareness without a clear, compelling position to land on is just noise.

Maintaining Your Position When Rivals Evolve

Brand positioning is not static, and neither are rivals. The competitive landscape shifts constantly, and a positioning that was sharp and distinctive five years ago can become blurred or irrelevant as rivals change their strategies.

This is one of the most underappreciated challenges in brand strategy. Brands invest significant effort in developing a position and then assume it will hold. But if the rival you were positioned against has moved, or if new entrants have occupied the space between you, the position needs to be revisited.

The discipline required here is regular competitive review, not just monitoring rival activity but actively assessing whether the contrast that defines your position is still meaningful to your target audience. This is different from chasing every competitor move. It is a structured, periodic reassessment of whether the strategic context that your positioning depends on still exists.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the consistent patterns in the work that won was that the brands behind it understood their competitive context with unusual clarity. They were not just aware of their rivals. They had a point of view on where the category was going and how their position would remain relevant as it evolved. That forward-looking competitive intelligence is what separates brands that sustain strong positions from those that have to reinvent themselves every few years.

There is also a brand equity dimension to this. Moz’s piece on brand equity risks touches on how accumulated brand value can erode when positioning becomes inconsistent or confused. Rivals that evolve can force exactly that kind of inconsistency if you are not watching carefully.

If you are working through how to build a brand strategy that holds up under competitive pressure, the full range of frameworks and tools is covered in the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub.

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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