What Is Positioning in Marketing?
Positioning is the third and final stage of the segmentation–targeting-positioning (STP) process: having divided a market into segments and chosen which segment to target, a business must decide how it wants that target customer to perceive its product relative to competitors. Ries and Trout (1981) popularised the term in their influential book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,” arguing that positioning is not something a company does to a product but something that happens in the mind of the customer, shaped by advertising, pricing, packaging and every other signal the brand sends. Kotler and Armstrong (2018) describe the practical output of this thinking as a positioning statement, a short internal description of the target segment, the category the product competes in, and the single point of difference the business wants to own. Because positioning lives in perception rather than in the product itself, two competitors with genuinely similar products can occupy very different positions if customers perceive them differently.
Building a Positioning Map
A positioning map plots competing products or brands against two attributes that matter most to the target customer, typically drawn as a simple grid with one attribute on each axis. Common attribute pairs include price against quality, or performance against convenience, chosen because they capture the trade-off customers actually weigh up when choosing between options. Once competitors are plotted, gaps in the map often reveal genuine opportunities: a cluster of brands crowded into one corner of the grid suggests an oversupplied position, while an empty corner may represent an underserved combination of attributes that no competitor has yet claimed. A positioning map is only as useful as the honesty of the perceptions behind it, so marketers usually validate the plotted positions with customer research rather than relying on internal assumptions about where a brand sits.
Ries and Trout’s Six Positioning Questions
Ries and Trout set out a six-question framework that remains a practical checklist for choosing a defensible position. A business should first establish what position it currently owns in the customer’s mind, since a stated ambition means little if it contradicts existing perception. It should then decide what position it wants to own, being specific enough that the choice actually excludes some customers and some claims. The next two questions force realism: which competitor would have to be displaced to own that position, and whether the business genuinely has the resources, budget, product quality, distribution, patience, to win that fight. The fifth question asks whether the business can hold its nerve and stick with the position long enough for it to register, since positioning is built through repetition over years rather than a single campaign. The sixth checks for internal consistency, whether pricing, packaging, service standards and every other tactic actually support the position being claimed, rather than quietly undermining it.
Positioning and Repositioning
A position, once established, is not permanent. Customer needs shift, new competitors enter with sharper claims, and a brand’s own product changes over time, all of which can erode a position that once felt secure. Repositioning, deliberately shifting the perception a business has spent years building, is one of the higher-risk moves in marketing, since existing customers who valued the old position can feel alienated by the change even as a business tries to reach a new audience. This is why the sixth of Ries and Trout’s questions, consistency between claim and tactics, matters as much during a deliberate repositioning as it did when the original position was first established: a business that changes its pricing or product line without changing the story it tells risks confusing customers rather than repositioning them.
Summary
Positioning is the final stage of the STP process, translating a chosen target segment into a specific, defensible perception in the customer’s mind relative to competitors. A positioning map helps visualise where competitors sit on the attributes that matter most to customers, while Ries and Trout’s six-question framework tests whether a chosen position is realistic, ownable and sustainable. Because positioning lives in perception, it can also shift over time, making repositioning a deliberate but genuinely risky exercise when a business’s story stops matching what customers actually experience.
