Brand Positioning: How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market

In a crowded market, buyers compare you with whatever they already know, on terms they already understand. If they file you next to the market leader, you spend every sales meeting explaining why you are not a smaller, cheaper version of it. Positioning is how you choose that comparison yourself: what you are measured against, the difference you lead with and the buyers who care most about it.

This guide explains what positioning is and what it is not, the five decisions behind a strong position, and how companies chose or changed their position. It includes my own experience choosing a niche, a statement and map you can copy, a plan for testing a new position before you change the whole brand, and how to turn the position into the story your company tells.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan is a partner in Fieldtrip, a group of marketing agencies, which is mentioned in this article.

What brand positioning is, and what it is not

April Dunford was a marketing executive at seven startups, by her account, and wrote the book Obviously Awesome on positioning. Her introduction to positioning (opens in a new tab) gives a useful definition: "Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about." Her shorter version: positioning defines which market you intend to win and why you deserve to win it.

She is just as clear about what positioning is not. It is not messaging, a tagline, a brand story or a mission. Those come afterwards, and each needs the positioning as its starting point. That order matters for a marketing leader: a new campaign or brand story cannot fix a position that sets buyers up to compare you with the wrong alternative.

Her best illustration is the category label. Tell a buyer your product is a CRM, and before you reach your second slide they assume Salesforce is your competitor, the head of sales is your buyer, and your features and price follow from that. Good positioning sets off assumptions that are true. Bad positioning leaves sales and marketing to undo assumptions that are false.

The five decisions behind a position

Dunford breaks positioning into five components. Because each depends on the others, her quickstart guide (opens in a new tab) works through them in a set order, starting with competitive alternatives, a choice she credits to reading Clayton Christensen's work on the jobs customers hire products to do.

The first and last mistakes are the two traps Dunford names; the others are this guide's reading of her Janna example, below.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

The last row is a real trade-off. An existing category lends you everything buyers already know about it, and a qualifier narrows the field. A new category can make you the leader of something, but Dunford warns that you must first spend a significant amount of time and effort making the term mean something in buyers' minds.

Four positioning moves and when to use them

Janna and the database product changed an existing position. Slack's memo shows a positioning choice made before launch, when its co-founder believed the company had to create a market. Avis shows how a challenger can make its place in the category part of its promise. Three of the accounts come from people inside the company at the time, and the fourth from Avis's own history.

Narrow the market you fight in: Janna Systems

Dunford ran marketing at Janna Systems when it sold enterprise CRM against Siebel. By her account, Siebel had 8,000 employees to Janna's couple of dozen, $2 billion in revenue to Janna's under $2 million, and 400 customers to Janna's 6. Every meeting began with the question of how Janna was better than Siebel, which played to Siebel's strengths.

Janna had a feature Siebel could not match: a different way of modeling relationships. When customers asked what they would do with it, the answer was "Anything you want!" An investment bank that bought the product showed its value: insight into the personal relationships that start new deals and influence open ones. Janna moved its sales and marketing to investment banks and repositioned as CRM for investment banks. Dunford writes that the company grew from under $2 million to close to $80 million over the next 18 months, before Siebel acquired it.

Change the product's category: an embeddable database

In her first job, as a product marketer at a startup, Dunford was assigned a product sold as a "Microsoft Access killer". After a significant marketing effort it had sold barely 200 copies. When the company was considering winding it down, she spoke with 100 customers. Of those, 94 did not know they had it, and 6 had transformed their business with it. They had put it on laptops and mobile devices so that field sales and service staff could take orders and update records in the field, then sync with the office. The company repositioned it as an embeddable database for mobile devices, and she writes that it took off.

The lesson for an established brand is in the method. The value was already in the hands of a few customers who loved the product, and customer interviews revealed it.

Sell the outcome, not the product: Slack

Two weeks before Slack's preview release, Stewart Butterfield sent his team a memo, later published as "We Don't Sell Saddles Here (opens in a new tab)". He argued that too few people were shopping for group chat software to sell it well. "That's why what we're selling is organizational transformation." His analogy was a saddle company that sells horseback riding: it grows the market for saddles and gives the perfect context for talking about its own.

Slack was not repositioning out of a crowded field. Butterfield wrote that it was not fighting in a large, well-defined market with clear incumbents, and argued that it needed to create a market: the expensive route Dunford describes. It suits a company that can afford to teach buyers a new way of working, and it asks the product to deliver the outcome the marketing promises.

Turn second place into the reason to choose you: Avis

Avis's UK company history (opens in a new tab) records that by 1953 Avis had become the second largest car rental company in the US, and that in 1963 it launched the line "We're only No.2. We try harder". Second place became the reason to promise greater effort.

The useful choice is the comparison: a challenger can admit its place and explain what that means for customers. The Denver Post's 2013 account (opens in a new tab) also shows the limit. It reported that the gap between Hertz's and Avis's market shares narrowed from 61-29 in 1963 to 49-36 in 1966, that Hertz then answered ("No. 2 says he tries harder. Than who?"), and that the gap stabilized by 1969. A position built against a leader invites an answer, and the service has to keep the promise.

What I learned choosing a niche

When I started Lead Cookie, my LinkedIn prospecting company (since sold), I looked at who else was in the market. The biggest player made most of its money from courses and training, and its service work seemed to come second. Most of the smaller providers looked amateur, and the LinkedIn coaches put their training first. No one was really owning the done-for-you service and doing it well.

So we set out to be the number one done-for-you LinkedIn lead generation service, and I wrote "We do not compete on info-products" into the vision so I would not get distracted. More than once I almost added cold email, sales development reps or sales assistants as extra services. By the time I wrote about it in 2019, prospects had started telling us their research showed we were the leaders, and a large bank asked to partner with us because it had found we were number one in the LinkedIn space. In a 2019 post on value propositions, I put the test simply: "Can you become #1 in your niche?" I also wrote that "your value proposition is a multiplier on any marketing you do."

Narrowing is not the whole answer. The niche has to matter to the buyer. My example then was a development shop pitching AngularJS to real estate companies. A technical buyer cares about the framework; a real estate buyer may not know what it is. The claim mixes two things that do not matter to the same customer.

A test I ran shows how quickly the market answers. When I was VP of Sales for The Negotiator Guru, our first outreach campaign offered a broad range of negotiation services and drew no leads at all. We built a separate site, SFNegotiator.com, about one thing: reducing Salesforce contract costs. As I wrote in a February 2018 post on testing value propositions, the first call was booked by the end of the second week, 10 calls within 30 days and 30-plus within 90. We did not reposition the whole company. We tested a narrower position on one segment, through one channel, and let the response decide.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

Write it down: a positioning statement and a map

Write the statement after you have made the five decisions. Dunford calls the fill-in-the-blanks statement exercise "not only pointless but potentially dangerous" when it is used to find the positioning, because it assumes each blank has one obvious answer. Used afterwards, it records your choices in a form the whole team can check its work against.

A positioning map is a quick way to check the category choice. Plot your brand and the real alternatives on two attributes buyers use to choose. An empty space on the map is a hypothesis, not an opportunity: it may be empty because no buyer wants it.

How to build and test a new position

1. 1

   Talk to the customers who value you most

   Start with the customers who would be most upset to lose you, and ask what they would do without you and what changed when they started. Dunford found six customers who had transformed their business with her database product among the 100 she interviewed when the company was considering abandoning it.

2. 2

   List the alternatives from real deals

   Name the alternatives buyers weighed in won and lost deals, and count the deals that ended in no decision. Dunford notes that the real alternative is sometimes the customer's current way of working.

3. 3

   Pair each difference with its value and its proof

   For every attribute the alternatives lack, write what it lets the customer do and the evidence you can show: a named customer, a case or a measured result.

4. 4

   Choose the customers and the category

   Pick the segment that cares most about that value, then the category in which it is obvious to them. Prefer an existing category with a qualifier unless you can afford to teach buyers a new one.

5. 5

   Test it on one segment through one channel

   Put the new position in front of that segment through one channel, with its own page and its own sales script. I would review the first results after about a quarter, and agree beforehand what improvement over the previous position should look like. Replies and meeting quality are early signals; judge win rates once enough deals have closed to compare.

6. 6

   Roll it out, then watch the response

   When the test holds, carry the position into the website, sales materials, executive content and events. Plan how you would respond if competitors answer or the market changes, as Hertz did to Avis. Janna had planned to widen from investment banks to financial services.

Turn the position into the story your company tells

Once the position is set, the brand story is how people hear it. In B2B that story has to work for a buying group and hold across a long cycle, from the first article a buyer reads to the final presentation. Make the customer the hero and the company the guide: tell the story of a buyer's problem and what changed, with names and numbers where you have them.

Thought leadership carries weight here. The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (opens in a new tab) surveyed 3,484 business executives on LinkedIn in seven countries between November 30 and December 14, 2023. Of the decision-makers, 73% said an organization's thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials and product sheets.

Consistency is the work. The homepage, the sales deck, the executive's LinkedIn posts and the event talk should make the same claim to the same customers, in different formats. That only happens when sales, leadership and customer success agree on the story too, so brief them on the position before the campaign launches.

How to tell whether the position is working

A position earns its keep in sales conversations before it shows up in brand metrics. Watch the win rate against the alternative you named, the share of deals lost to no decision, the length of the sales cycle, the price you hold without discounting, and whether prospects start describing you in your own terms on discovery calls.

Don't expect the dashboard to settle it. On the Leaders of B2B Podcast (opens in a new tab) in December 2024, I pointed out that it is not uncommon for a B2B company to close 20 deals a year at half a million dollars each. The few interactions that moved one of those deals, such as a piece of content or a customer testimonial, can't be tracked in the data. My conclusion was that "there's intuition plus data as a guiding light, but it can't be the full piece there." Ask new customers why they chose you, read those answers beside the numbers, and review the position against both at least once a quarter.

If a buyer described your company to a colleague tomorrow, which alternative would they compare you with, and is that the comparison you want?