Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A statement that says which customer a product is the best choice for, which alternatives it is evaluated against, and for what value it should be chosen.
Full definition
In ordinary marketing usage, "positioning" often designates a brand's perceived place in a market — premium, generalist, challenger — and blurs into the register of the discourse or into the price level.
In the articles on this blog, the term follows the acceptation worked out by April Dunford: it doesn't only say what a product is, it says who it is the best choice for, against which alternatives, and for what value. The three terms hold together — a target customer with no named alternative says nothing about what is at stake at the moment of the trade-off, and a value asserted outside a segment can be verified nowhere.
Defined this way, positioning isn't a message: it is the framework that makes a market signal interpretable. It sits upstream of the discourse, and it is what the discourse translates.
Usage in the field
The term comes into play when you have to decide whether a competitor's move concerns you, when you have to arbitrate the breadth of a technical or commercial scope, and when a team is looking for why its market analyses lead to no decision.
Synonyms and variants
Positioning, promise, "who we address and what we fight against".
Not to be confused with
- Strategy — Strategy — the work of understanding and arbitration that decides where to play, for whom and at what level of risk; positioning is the statement it rests on, not the decision to commit.
- Competitive intelligence — Competitive intelligence — the activity of interpreting a market's movements; it consumes positioning, it doesn't replace it.
- Vision — a desired future state, stated to be shared; positioning describes a defensible place today against existing alternatives.
- Segmentation — the division of a market into sets of customers; positioning retains one of them and states what is at stake there.
Examples
"Positioning doesn't only say what a product is, it says who it is the best choice for, against which alternatives, and for what value." — the definition retained here.
"If you don't know precisely which customer you are targeting, which alternatives you are fighting, and why your product should be chosen" — the statement by absence, which gives the three terms.
Ambiguities / debates
The word is claimed by two functions: marketing, which sees in it the formulation of a discourse, and product, which sees in it a framework for decision. The two usages coexist without contradicting each other, but they aren't arbitrated in the same place — which explains how a positioning can be judged "done" because the home page is written, when no alternative has been named.