Brand Core · Brand Positioning · Module
Points of difference
What the brand is meant to be believed better at, held alongside the parity points it has to be credibly adequate on to be considered at all.
The idea
How it works
Most positioning failures are parity failures. A brand that is genuinely better at one thing and visibly inadequate at a category requirement is not considered at all, and the difference is never weighed.
A point of difference has three requirements: it must matter to the customer, be deliverable by the organisation, and be difficult for competitors to claim. Failing any one of them makes it an assertion rather than a position.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
List the parity requirements first
What must the brand be credibly adequate at to be considered? Those come before anything distinctive.
- 02
Test the difference on all three criteria
Matters to them, deliverable by us, hard for others to claim. Two out of three is not a position.
- 03
Name what you accept being worse at
A position with no trade-off is not a position. The accepted weakness is what makes the strength possible.
- 04
Check whether a competitor could say it
Substitute their name into the sentence. If it still reads as true, the difference is category-level.
One level in
The components of points of difference
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Most positioning failures are parity failures. Being inadequate at a category requirement means the difference is never weighed.
The other modules in brand positioning
Frame of reference
What the customer compares the brand with — the category they file it under, which is frequently not the one the organisation would choose.
LearnThe positioning statement
The internal sentence that fixes the position: for whom, in what frame, what difference, on what basis — written for the organisation rather than for the market.
LearnBrand architecture
How brands relate to one another where there is more than one — what carries the master brand, what stands alone, and what the customer is expected to connect.
Learn