How many “positions” are there anyway?

It’s a slippery fish. “Positioning” has as many definitions as “brand”, “love”, and “sport.”

Many positioning exercises lay out the who-what-where-when-why-&-how of your offering. Like positioning Mad Libs: “For [ ], our brand is the only [ ] that [ ] your tummy because we [ ].”

And over the years I’ve seen (and done) scores of X-Y plots of competitors in category audits.

But there’s a simple place to start: with the four basic positions in the market.

🏵️ ECONOMY: AKA budget, entry-level, cheap, no-frills, discount, etc. 

🏵️🏵️  MASS: midtier. A reasonable price-value combo. Beans means Heinz.

🏵️🏵️🏵️  PREMIUM: high-quality, refined, nicer. Yeti coolers, natch.

🏵️🏵️🏵️🏵️  LUXURY: elite, extra. Private jets, oui?

It’s basic, but it helps you line up a lot of things about your brand. 

F’rinstance, if you’re a premium financial services brand, you ought to have nice beverages & snacks & furniture at your office. And your merch should be Yeti and Retro 51 and Patagonia, not cheap no-name stuff.

Some key points:

1. Do the tiers blur? Yep. And sometimes you can MAKE them blur. Like when P&G relaunched Olay as a “masstige” brand: pricey stuff in mass retailers.

2. Do they exist in all categories & industries? Nope. And sometimes you can MAKE one exist. (Paging Yeti premium coolers….).

3. Are there exceptions? Yep. Sometimes there is truly a killer product that’s a budget price. Or some other axis to meaningfully separate similarly-priced brands. But most of the time, that Y-axis stuff is highly correlated with price, so all the brands line up along the diagonal.

4. Can you only compete in one tier? Nope. But it’s really hard to be famous across tiers. And it’s extra hard to go upmarket. (Which is why mass car brands like Nissan & Honda created premium brands Infiniti & Acura.) 

So: if you’re working out your brand’s positioning, start with the basics: what tier are you competing in?