When your car starts to slip on a wet road, every rally driver knows one thing: don’t look at the tree. Look where you want to go, or you’ll hit exactly what you tried to avoid.
Brand positioning works the same way.
I meet companies that spend days analysing competitors. They scroll through their rivals’ websites, dissect taglines, and hunt for “gaps” in the market by hoarding screenshots and comparing features. And then they drive straight into the tree.
Stop looking sideways
You don’t win your customer’s attention by out-copying your competitor’s playbook. You win it by knowing who you are, what you offer, and why that matters. Not in general. In this moment, for this audience, in this category.
What most brands do when they chase competitors has little to do with strategy. They’re afraid of being wrong. So they look around, imitate the safe thing, and call it benchmarking. If your strategy is built on reacting to others, it’s called drift.
Your real competition is confusion
Your biggest risk is an audience that can’t figure out why they should care about you. Whether that competitor is louder or bigger matters less.
Because if your message isn’t clear, your offer isn’t obvious, and your distinctiveness is watered down, you’ve already lost.
Confused customers don’t compare. They scroll.
Find your own direction
In our brand positioning workshop we start with you. Your business reality. Your convictions. Your audience’s language. Your internal tensions. The competitors come later.
Only once you know what you’re trying to say do we look around. To carve space deliberately, without copying.
Positioning is about doing what only you can, in a way the market understands and remembers. The gap the others left is no benchmark for that.
