Positioning is subtraction

In short

Positioning gets mistaken for communication, for the claim, the logo, the tone of voice. It’s something else: the decision about what an offering competes against and the context it’s meant to be read in. The first question isn’t which companies you’re up against. It’s what the customer would do if you didn’t exist. Usually nothing. Everything else falls out of that answer, right down to which features get built at all. It needs a strategy above it to derive from. Without one, positioning stays a claim.

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There’s a sentence I left hanging in the Built for the Everyday series. If you don’t know whose ideal you’re building the line for, you can’t align the journey and you optimise into the void. Without clear positioning there’s no clear journey. I asserted that and deferred it to an article of its own. This is it.

What positioning isn’t

The most common confusion: positioning isn’t what’s written on the outside. It isn’t the claim, the logo, the visual language. All of that comes afterwards, and it can make good positioning visible or wrap bad positioning up nicely.

Positioning decides the context an offering gets read in. It determines which comparisons the customer makes, which expectations they bring, and which properties they notice at all. The same thing lands completely differently in two contexts. A tool that looks expensive in a DIY store looks cheap in a professional workshop catalogue. And it doesn’t stop at perception, but more on that below.

April Dunford has given us the most usable way of thinking about this that I know. It doesn’t start with your own product, it starts with the alternatives: what would the customer do if you weren’t there. Out of that answer falls what you can do that the alternatives can’t. Out of that, in turn, what value that creates for the customer, who has the strongest interest in that value, and the context in which it becomes obvious. Right at the end sits the question of which trends make the offering relevant precisely now. Five steps, plus one, and the first one carries all the others.

The first question

This is where most positioning falls over, immediately. Asked about competition, companies name companies. The two or three names from the industry, the ones whose prices get watched and who come up in management meetings.

The customer doesn’t think like that. They have a problem and they weigh up what to do about it. One option is your offering. Another is a competitor. A third is building something themselves, the spreadsheet, the script, the intern. And a fourth, which wins most of the time: do nothing. Carry on suffering. The problem is real, but not big enough to justify the effort of changing.

Position only against the industry names and you’re positioning against the smallest part of the field. The real competition is the status quo, and the status quo is cheap, familiar and requires no explanation to anybody.

What you end up with isn’t a list, it’s a selection. Which is why positioning is subtraction. You keep what carries and drop the rest, even when the rest is true. Especially when it’s true.

Positioning, read through itself

If the thinking is any good it has to survive being applied to itself. So: positioning as the product.

What would a company do if it didn’t exist. It would describe itself, at length and accurately. It would add features because a competitor has them. It would cut the price. It would buy reach. Or it would rebrand, new logo, new claim, and call that positioning. And the strongest alternative here too: leave everything as it is and hope the product speaks for itself.

What can positioning do that these alternatives can’t. This is where the usual answer falls short. Positioning doesn’t only change how a product is read. It changes the product. Decide who you’re there for and you’ve decided which features, capabilities and properties get built and which don’t. And that’s exactly where it breaks stuck in the middle open. Build for everyone and you land in the middle, where nobody misses you. Deciding who you don’t serve is the only way out.

What value comes of it. Everything downstream becomes decidable. The journey, the roadmap, the price, the channel, what you go without.

Who has the strongest interest in that. The leadership first, the CEO, the CFO, plus stakeholders, shareholders, owners. But that’s where it starts rather than where it stops. The stronger interest sits with the people who have to work with it daily: the ones who build the product, market it, sell it. Without positioning they have to invent it themselves, each of them separately and each of them differently. They don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong, they go round in circles, or they end up building whatever the loudest voice in the room wants.

And the context this becomes obvious in. Not marketing. Strategy. Which is the condition the whole thing rests on: positioning only does its work when there’s a strategy above it, and above the strategy a mission and a vision it can all be derived from. Strategy here doesn’t mean strategic planning, not the cost side, not the budget. It means strategy in Roger Martin’s sense, the decision about where to play. The customer side. Only once that’s settled can you build the highest value for exactly those customers, and only then does positioning develop its full force and reach back into the product and the value proposition.

Which doesn’t mean it only runs top down. You can start from the product you already have and work backwards to the missing pieces, the target customer, the value, the context. Top down and bottom up both work. What doesn’t work is positioning with nothing above it.

Then the bonus, the trends. Two of them are meshing right now. The customer faces an effectively unlimited number of offerings, digital ones above all, and has time to evaluate none of them. They choose what they can place immediately. At the same time everything has become quick to copy. A visible digital feature is rebuilt in weeks now, and with AI a look at it is often enough. What’s left when features become effectively free is the choice. Positioning is the only part of an offering that can’t be copied, because it isn’t a capability. It’s a decision about who you’re not there for.

A case from outside

One example working visibly right now is the Elroq. It leads the 2026 registration figures for electric cars in Germany, well clear of models that sat at the top for years.

The alternatives are easy to see here. An established market leader with its own charging network and a strong brand. New entrants from China attacking on equipment and price. Group models from the same parent. And the strongest alternative of the lot, the one that shows up in no competitive analysis: keep the combustion car you’ve got and wait another year.

Against that field the offering is cut remarkably narrow. The car isn’t the cheapest. It hasn’t got the longest range. It hasn’t got the most technology. It wins no specification comparison at all, and clearly has no intention of trying. What’s left is packaging, interior space well beyond what the exterior length suggests, physical buttons for the things you need while driving, familiar technology with no experiment in it, a dealer network, a residual value. Together that adds up to a single promise: an electric car that raises no questions in everyday use.

The target customer has been subtracted accordingly. Anyone wanting the newest software isn’t meant. Anyone chasing the lowest price isn’t meant. The one who is meant is the person who found switching too much bother and really just wants a sensible family car that happens to run on electricity. That’s positioning against doing nothing, not against a rival model.

How seriously that alternative deserves to be taken is something I proved on myself. In an interview with Klaus Zellmer, CEO of Škoda Auto, at the end of 2024, I placed a bet: in 2025 the Elroq would outsell its own combustion sibling, the Karoq. Not a competitor. The combustion counterpart from the same house, which is to say the status quo itself. The Elroq then arrived not on the first of January but late. I lost the bet, narrowly, by a few hundred units, as Zellmer told me himself afterwards. For 2026 he’s convinced the Elroq will beat the Karoq comfortably. The bet isn’t the point. What the car is actually up against is the point.

And because something is allowed not to fit in someone else’s case: this positioning comes at a price, and it’s paid in-house. The car is so complete and so roomy that it makes the bigger, dearer model from the same brand redundant for a lot of families. Position cleanly and you cannibalise. That isn’t a mishap, it’s the bill. The only question is whether you totted it up beforehand or got surprised afterwards.

What follows from this

Positioning isn’t a communications job you bolt on at the end of a project. It’s the decision taken beforehand that steers everything after it, into the roadmap and into the journey. Because a journey can only be built for an ideal. Choose none and you build for an average nobody embodies, and you optimise into the void.

The test is uncomfortably simple. If you can’t say who your offering isn’t built for, you haven’t positioned it. You’ve only described it.

Sources

Positioning logic (alternatives before attributes, context as the decisive variable, the status quo as the strongest competitor, the trend as bonus question): April Dunford, “Obviously Awesome”. The thinking is hers, the application and any errors in it are mine.

Strategy as choice rather than planning, where to play as a customer decision: Roger L. Martin and A. G. Lafley, “Playing to Win”.

Market position and product character of the Elroq (top of the German BEV registrations in 2026, deliberately understated positioning, physical buttons, interior space relative to exterior length, proximity to the larger model from the same brand): auto motor und sport, auto-motor-und-sport.de; carwow, carwow.de; auto-klartext.de. Prices vary considerably by variant and model year and are deliberately not quoted here. Registration figures should be checked against the current KBA position before publication.

The bet and its outcome come from my interview with Klaus Zellmer at the end of 2024 and a later personal conversation.