How you choose to be understood in the market: which customers you serve, what you are better at for them, compared with which alternatives, and in which category. It decides what you say and what you leave out.
Example
Picture Meera's store if it had started out as 'trendy, affordable clothes for everyone'. Repositioning it as 'office and festive wear for working women in Pune, fitted in 48 hours' would change her content, prices and ad targeting to match.
How you'll hear it
“We are not losing on price; our positioning puts us against the wrong alternatives.”
What it helps you decide
Whom to target and whom to ignore, what to feature in content, how to price, and which competitors to compare against. A clear position makes content choices easy; an unclear one makes every post a guess.
Where people misread it
Teams treat positioning as a tagline exercise. The common mistake is positioning for everyone, which makes the brand easy to ignore, and judging a repositioning by order count alone.
The story
Meera narrows her position (illustrative)
Suppose Meera's store had started out differently. This 'before' is a hypothetical starting point, not her numbers: ads saying 'trendy clothes for everyone', competing with every store and marketplace on price, and an average order of ₹1,600.
She repositions: office and festive wear for working women in Pune, fitted in 48 hours. Content now shows fits, fabrics and office settings. Ad spend stays at ₹1,00,000. The 'after' rows are her store as it runs today.
| Orders before (hypothetical) | 250 |
| Average order before | ₹1,600 |
| Sales before | ₹4,00,000 |
|---|---|
| Orders after (today) | 200 |
| Average order after | ₹2,000 |
| Sales after | ₹4,00,000 |
Her first reaction is worry: 50 fewer orders, and sales no higher. That is the number that looks wrong.
What it hides: gross profit, at 70% of sales, is the same ₹2,80,000, but she now packs and ships 50 fewer parcels, which saves 50 × ₹100 = ₹5,000 a month. The bigger gain is the customer. Working women buy two or three office pieces at once, come back about three times a year and do not wait for a sale. The 'everyone' buyer mostly chased the next discount.
What to look at instead: average order value, gross profit after shipping and repeat purchase from the chosen customer, not total orders from everyone.
All figures are illustrative; a repositioning will not always raise sales, and results take time to show.
Don't confuse it with
- Value proposition: the value proposition is what you promise; positioning is the strategic choice of whom and against what you make that promise.
- Tagline: a line of copy, not the strategy behind it.
Related terms
Sources
- An introduction to positioning, April Dunford