Sample frameDay 045·Marketing · Strategy

Good morning. Buyers never judge your product alone. They compare it — against whatever is already in their head.

Marketing.

Positioning

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

In the pitch you'll give this week, what will the buyer silently compare you to — and if you can't name it, why haven't you chosen the comparison for them?

The idea

Al Ries and Jack Trout — the advertising strategists who introduced 'positioning' in Advertising Age in 1972 and expanded it into Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981) — argued that the battle is not fought in the market at all; it is fought in the prospect's mind, and that mind is already full. Buyers cope with oversupply by keeping short mental ladders — a few names per category — and every new product gets filed against something already on one. You cannot force a new ladder into someone's head; you can only attach to an existing one, the way 7-Up became the 'Uncola' and Avis prospered by admitting it was No. 2 to Hertz. The trap is positioning from the inside. Most people describe the product on its own terms — features, credentials, the competitors they fear — and leave the buyer to choose the comparison. They will, and they will choose the one that flatters you least.

The framework

01
Find the ladder you're actually on — from the buyer's side.
Ask the last five people who bought, and the last five who didn't, what they weighed you against. The answers are rarely your named competitors: they are a spreadsheet, an agency, an intern, or doing nothing at all — and whichever it is, that alternative is the ladder the buyer has filed you on. You cannot position against a reference you have not identified, and guessing from the inside almost always flatters you.
02
Anchor to something the mind already holds.
The strongest positions borrow strength from something the buyer already knows: Avis attached itself to Hertz and turned second place into a reason to believe it tried harder; 7-Up attached itself to cola and became the alternative to an entire category. Choose your reference deliberately — the category leader, the category itself, or the old way of doing the job — and define yourself by the one difference that matters against it. The test is a single sentence of the form 'unlike the reference, we do this'; if that sentence needs a paragraph of context, you have chosen the wrong reference.
03
Claim one word, and cut everything competing with it.
Ries and Trout's sharpest instruction was to own a single word in the prospect's mind, the way Volvo came to own safety and FedEx came to own overnight. Decide the one attribute you want attached to your name, then audit your homepage, your deck and your last ten introductions for claims that compete with it. A buyer offered quality, speed, service and price in the same breath files you under none of them; the mind keeps roughly one word per name, and it will choose yours if you don't.
04
Put the position in the first sentence, everywhere.
A position that lives only in a strategy document does not exist. It exists in the opening line of your sales call, the header of your homepage and the first sentence of your intro email — the places where the buyer forms the comparison before you have finished talking. Rewrite each of those to carry the reference and the difference, and keep the wording consistent across every surface; a position said three different ways is three weak positions, not one strong one.

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