Brand Positioning: Take Their Spot

I said "next month."

That was over a year ago.

But here's the part that actually bothers me. I've used the word "de-position" twice in this newsletter. Once in the Prologue. Once in Edition 02. Both times like you already knew what it meant. I never once stopped to explain it.

So today I'm paying off both debts at once.

The timing turned out fine, though, because positioning matters more right now than it has in years. Every company in your category shipped the same AI features in the same twelve months. Go read four competitor homepages back to back. Same promise. Same three benefits. Same "powered by AI." Same screenshot of a dashboard.

Those are four different companies.

When products actually differ, positioning is a nice-to-have. When they don't, positioning is the product.

"Positioning is not what you do to a product. It's what you do to the mind of the prospect."

Al Ries & Jack Trout

What Is Positioning?

Positioning is the space your brand occupies in your prospect's mind, relative to everyone else who wants that space.

Not what you say about yourself. Where you sit.

The idea belongs to Al Ries and Jack Trout. They ran a three-part series in Advertising Age in April and May of 1972 called "The Positioning Era Cometh," which became the 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Their argument was that your prospect's mind is not a blank page waiting for your message. It's a crowded room. And it defends itself.

So the mind does what any overwhelmed person does. It sorts things into short lists. Best cheap one. Best fast one. Best safe one. Two or three names per slot, maybe.

Which brings us to the other half of the job.

De-positioning is deliberately changing how the market sees your competitor, so the slot they're sitting in stops looking valuable.

Quick note on the vocabulary. The industry term for this is "repositioning the competition," which is Trout's own phrasing. I say de-positioning because it's clearer about what's actually happening: you're not moving them somewhere better, you're taking something away from them. Renaming the category to suit myself is, as you'll see in about four hundred words, the first Move.

How Positioning Differs from Awareness and Sophistication

We now have three concepts that sound related, and marketers mix them up constantly. Here's the clean split:

• Market Awareness (Edition 03) is about one prospect. What does this person already know? You move it. That's what your funnel is for.
• Market Sophistication (Edition 06) is about the whole market. What has this market already heard? You don't move it. Time and competitors move it.
• Positioning is about you. Where do you stand? Nobody moves it but you.

Awareness and Sophistication are weather reports. You can misread them and be wrong.

Positioning is a decision. You can't be wrong about it. You can only be unclaimed, unclear, or unbelievable.

Two clarifications before we go further, because sharp readers will catch both.

First, I told you in Edition 06 that Sophistication is entirely out of your control. That's still true. De-positioning doesn't move the market to a new Stage. It changes who's sitting in the good slot at the current Stage. You're not resetting the clock. You're taking someone's chair while it runs.

Second, Ries and Trout would push back on "you fully control your Position," and they'd be right. The Position lives in your prospect's head, not your pitch deck. So the precise version is better: you control the Position you claim. You don't control whether it lands.

And one more, since Edition 06 is only one edition back: a Unique Mechanism is not a Position. A Mechanism is a claim about how your product works. A Position is a claim about where you stand relative to everyone else. Apple's M1 chip was a Mechanism. "Think Different" was the Position. One can support the other. They are not the same thing.

The Position Swap

Here's the whole idea in one sentence:

The shelf is already full.

Every category has a short shelf in your prospect's mind, and every slot on it is spoken for. You do not get added. Somebody comes off so you can go on.

Positioning is what you put on. De-positioning is what you take off.

It's one motion. We just describe it from two ends.

The 5 De-Positioning Moves

These are ordered by how close you get to your competitor. Move 1, you never mention them. Move 5, you go straight at the thing they're proudest of.

Work down the list, not up. Most marketers reach for Move 5 first, which is the one that requires the most proof and buys the least goodwill.

Move 1: Redefine the Category

"We're not one of those."

You refuse the box. And by refusing it, you put every competitor inside it and stand outside.

The famous version is 7Up. They couldn't win "best cola," so around 1968 they stopped trying and called themselves the Uncola. One word, and Coke and Pepsi collapsed into a single interchangeable thing.

Here's a version I ran myself, starting with the mistake I had to fix.

I worked with a brand selling a natural energy supplement. We launched it as an Adderall replacement. Felt obvious at the time. Big category, sharp pain, people already searching for exactly that.

It was a trap, and I didn't see it.

When you call yourself an Adderall replacement, you have volunteered for a comparison you cannot win. The prospect's next thought is "okay, is it as strong as Adderall?" And it isn't. It never will be. That's the entire point of the product. We had de-positioned ourselves.

So we went and asked. Free samples, $5.99 shipping, and two multiple-choice questions at the end:

• What problem are you hoping this product solves?
• What are you hoping this product does?

Question one came back exactly as expected. Distraction. People couldn't stay on task through the day.

Question two did not. Offered "Focus," "Attention," and "Energy," the people who had actually tried it overwhelmingly chose "Better Mood."

Nobody in that category was talking about mood. Every competitor was selling a sharper, faster, more productive version of you. So we left. New copy, new visual language, calmer and more natural, built around how the product made people feel instead of how much it made them do.

Conversion went from under 1% to over 6%.

We didn't beat the nootropics. We stopped being one.

AI Example: Watch the brands stamping "made by humans" on their work right now. They aren't claiming better AI. They're refusing the category outright, which pushes everyone else into one box labeled "the machines made this." Same Move, roughly sixty years after the Uncola.

(Full disclosure: I'm on the other side of this trade. I build AI systems for a living. It's still the cleanest example of Move 1 I've seen in a decade, and pretending otherwise would make me a worse teacher.)

Move 2: Narrow the Category

"In this specific thing, we're the only one."

If you can't win the shelf, build a smaller shelf you're already #1 on. Ries and Trout wrote the law: if you can't be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.

Domino's never claimed the pizza was good. They narrowed all the way down to hot pizza at your door in thirty minutes, and owned delivery speed instead. (That guarantee was retired back in 1993, but the positioning lesson outlived it by thirty years.)

AI Example: When an AI shopping assistant evaluates your offer before a human ever sees it, narrow beats broad, badly. "Best CRM" has no answer. "CRM for solo real estate agents in Florida" has exactly one. Narrowing used to be how you got remembered. Now it's how you get retrieved.

Move 3: Reframe the Criteria

"You're asking the wrong question."

Don't argue that you're better. Change what "better" means.

Volvo entered a market that judged cars on styling, power, and price, and made safety the yardstick. They never had to say a competitor's name. Once safety was the measure, every other car company was losing at a game they hadn't entered.

AI Example: Comparison pages are everywhere this year. Every challenger brand has a "vs." page now. Most of them are wasted, because they're comparing when they should be reframing. Here's the thing nobody says out loud: a comparison table is a criteria list, and whoever builds the table picks the rows. If you're using their rows, you already lost.

Move 4: Expose the Hidden Cost

"Sure, it works. Here's what it costs you."

Concede the benefit. Then attach the tax.

Tylenol ran ads that opened with the millions of people who shouldn't take aspirin: the stomach irritation, the reactions, the small amounts of bleeding you'd never notice. They ran something like sixty words before they even said the word Tylenol. Aspirin was never called ineffective. It was made expensive, in a currency nobody had been counting.

AI Example: "We have AI" concedes nothing in 2026, because so does everyone. The hidden cost is one layer down: whose model learns from your data, who's liable when the output is wrong, and whether your customers can feel the difference. Buyers are getting sensitive about that last one. If you have real survey data on AI-generated content and trust, this is where it goes. Not as decoration. As the receipt.

Move 5: Flip Their Strength

"The thing they brag about is the problem."

Take their single greatest asset and make it the reason to leave. Not their weak spot. Nobody bought them for their weak spot.

Avis was losing to Hertz and hadn't turned a profit in thirteen years. Doyle Dane Bernbach took the account in 1962, and the campaign that followed rested on two words: "We try harder." The copy said the quiet part out loud. When you're only No. 2, you try harder. Then it listed the proof: cleaner ashtrays, fuller gas tanks, shorter lines.

Read that again, because none of it is about Avis. Every one of those proof points is an accusation about Hertz. Being #1, the thing that made Hertz the safe choice, got turned into the reason to leave: the lines, the complacency, the ashtray nobody emptied. Avis never claimed to be bigger. Avis claimed that not being bigger was your advantage.

They turned their first profit inside a year.

AI Example: Every incumbent is bragging about scale and end-to-end automation. Flip it. Their scale is why you're a ticket number. Their automation is why you will never, under any circumstances, reach a human being.

The Only Test

Before you de-position anyone, make sure you have a Position worth defending. Fill in the blanks:

Now hand that sentence to your biggest competitor.

If they can drop their name in the front and it's still true... you don't have a Position. You have a description.

Keep narrowing the middle blank until the sentence breaks for everybody but you.

The Best Sentence Drill

Here's how you actually run the Moves, and it takes about twenty minutes.

• Go find your top competitor's single strongest sentence. Their best claim, in their own words, copied exactly. (This is what all that Competitor Research in Edition 02 was for.)
• Write it at the top of a blank page.
• Run all five Moves against it. One line each. Five outputs.
• Whichever one makes their best sentence sound like a weakness... that's your Copy Code.

Note that you're attacking their strongest claim, not their weakest. Marketers get this backwards constantly. Beating up a competitor's soft spot changes nothing, because that's not why anyone chose them.

How Far You Can Go

There's a line running through the middle of those five Moves, and you should know exactly where it is.

Moves 1 through 3, you never assert a single fact about a competitor. You redefine, you narrow, you reframe. You're rearranging the field, not making claims about somebody else's product. Nothing to prove, nothing to defend.

Moves 4 and 5, you are now saying something factual about another company. Every word of it has to be substantiable before it ships.

Above the line, you need a good idea. Below it, you need a receipt.

And to be clear, I'm a copywriter, not your lawyer. If you're naming names or bidding on a competitor's brand terms, get it reviewed by someone who is.

Quick Recap

• Move 1: Redefine the Category. Refuse the box, and put everyone else in it.
• Move 2: Narrow the Category. Shrink the field until you're the only one in it.
• Move 3: Reframe the Criteria. Change what "best" means. Build the table yourself.
• Move 4: Expose the Hidden Cost. Concede the benefit, then attach the tax.
• Move 5: Flip Their Strength. Make the thing they brag about the reason to leave.