Positioning
Positioning
Positioning is the act of defining where a company or product stands in the mind of a buyer — what category it leads, what makes it distinct, and why that distinctness matters now.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy laid out a five-part framework for category positioning:
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Name the category precisely. Fill in: “[your company], the global leader in X.” X should be 2–3 words — one deeply familiar to the audience, the others piquing curiosity. The goal is to make people feel both safe and interested.
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Frustrate older competitors with partial overlap. The best positioning has one foot in the known and one in the new. Force competitors to explain their product through your category’s lens, specifically the new element you introduced.
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Tie to inexorable trends. Anchor the category to external trends (technological, social, otherwise) that explain why it will grow. Positioning borrowed from the future.
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Start small and hyper-focused. To become the global leader in a new category, dominate a narrow beachhead first. Never lie about what’s possible today; never mute the scope of your ambition for what it’ll become.
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Compound in the new area. Make the hard-to-build element of your product the center of your messaging and roadmap. The category leader captures 80% of resources — you compound your strength in the new element to constantly widen the gap.
Where this appears
- Ongoing Thread on Category Creation… (tweet)