Positioning
In one line
Positioning is the deliberate work of shaping the place a brand occupies in the customer's mind, relative to alternatives.
Going deeper
Positioning is the concept Al Ries and Jack Trout introduced in a 1972 Advertising Age series and codified in their 1981 book of the same name. The thesis is blunt: marketing isn't about being the biggest in the market; it's about owning a specific category in the customer's mind.
A clean positioning passes the one-sentence test. Volvo = safety, Disney = family, Starbucks = third place — a single word or two surfaces unprompted. Korean equivalents include Baemin = delivery and Coupang = next-day shipping.
The hardest part is deciding what not to be. A brand that promises everything to everyone ends up owning nothing in particular. Strong positioning is usually visible by what it deliberately gives up.
Sources
Related terms
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile that summarises an ideal target customer's demographics, behaviours, goals and pain points in a single, shareable form.
MarketingBrand Awareness
Brand awareness is the degree to which customers recognise or recall a brand within a category — one of the foundational assets of any marketing function.
MarketingContent Marketing
Content marketing is the practice of building trust and demand by publishing genuinely useful content, rather than buying attention through direct advertising.
MarketingPMF
Product-market fit (PMF) is the state where a product clearly satisfies a real market demand — usage compounds, churn drops and word of mouth starts doing real work.
MarketingNorth Star Metric
A north star metric (NSM) is the single number that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers, used to align decisions across the whole company.
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