Your Competitor Isn’t Your Benchmark
When your car starts to slip on a wet road, there’s one thing every rally driver knows: 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 who spend days analyzing competitors. They scroll through their rivals’ websites, dissect taglines, and try to find “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, but in this moment, for this audience, in this category.
Most brands that chase competitors aren’t actually being strategic. They’re just afraid of being wrong. So they look around, imitate the safe thing, and call it benchmarking. But if your strategy is built on reacting to others, what you’ve got isn’t a strategy. It’s drift.
Your real competition is confusion
The real risk isn’t that your competitor is louder or bigger. It’s that your audience can’t figure out why they should care about you. 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 don’t start with competitors. We start with you. Your business reality. Your convictions. Your audience’s language. Your internal tensions.
Only then, when you know what you’re trying to say, we look around. Not to copy. But to deliberately carve space.
Positioning isn’t about doing what the others aren’t. It’s about doing what only you can, in a way the market understands and remembers.
Want clarity that cuts through the noise?
Our one-day brand positioning workshop helps you realign your message, sharpen your focus, and stop crashing into trees you never meant to hit.
