Established model
Positioning
Al Ries & Jack Trout · 1981
Positioning happens in the mind of the audience, not in the product, and the mind has very little room.
Its place in the frameworkBrand Core›Brand Positioning
What it does
The argument is that people hold a short ordered list per category and defend it against new information, so the task is to find an unoccupied position and take it — including, if necessary, by defining a narrower category you can lead. Its most quoted advice is negative: attacking a position someone else already holds is the most expensive campaign there is.
- Reach for it when
- When entering a market where someone is already the obvious answer.
- Where it stops
- Written before the internet, in a world of three television channels and scarce attention. The scarcity is still real; the mechanics of getting into a category have changed completely.
Al Ries & Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, McGraw-Hill, 1981.
Why it sits at Brand Positioning
The place the brand occupies in someone else’s mind: which category they file it under, what they think it is better at, and what they would accept it being ordinary at.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Frame of referenceRies and Trout’s Positioning (1981), and the category-entry-point work that followed on how buyers actually retrieve options.
- Points of differenceKeller’s points-of-difference and points-of-parity framework within customer-based brand equity.
- The positioning statementThe standard positioning-statement form used across brand practice since the 1980s: target, frame, benefit, reason to believe.
- Brand architectureAaker and Joachimsthaler’s brand relationship spectrum, from branded house through to house of brands.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Brand Positioning lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Business CoreThe value proposition settles what the offer does better; this object settles what the market believes.
- Market CoreFrame and competitor set come from the market analysis, and positioning is what is done with them.
- Brand PerceptionWhether the intended position was actually taken up is a perception measurement.
- Goal CoreA position takes years to hold, which makes it a long term goal rather than a campaign.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Brand Positioning too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- Points of parity and differenceSome attributes get you considered at all; only the rest make anyone choose you.
Elsewhere in Brand Core
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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