The Hardest Decision in Positioning

Photo by Jason W on Unsplash

Choosing the level of abstraction at which to compete

Every company wants to occupy a distinctive place in the customer's mind. The question is rarely whether to position. It is where that position should exist.

Much of the discussion around positioning quickly turns to communication. How should we differentiate? What should we say? What story should we tell?

Important questions, but they come later.

Before deciding how to communicate, a company must first decide what association it wants to own. That choice is less straightforward than it appears.

The same business can be described in multiple ways: by the product it sells, the features it offers, the functional benefits it delivers, the customer outcomes it enables, or the broader idea it seeks to represent. These are not competing descriptions. They are different levels of meaning applied to the same business.

Each description is true, and each occupies a different level of abstraction.

Choosing between them is one of the most consequential strategic decisions a company can make, because it defines the competitive arena in which the business will be judged. Position around products, and competition is likely to revolve around features and price. Position around broader outcomes or associations, and the basis of competition changes entirely. The level of abstraction shapes not only how customers perceive a company, but also how it grows, differentiates and defends its position over time.

The instinct is often to move upwards. Products become solutions. Solutions become outcomes. Outcomes become ideas.

Higher levels of abstraction allow companies to compete for broader mental territory than the product alone permits, creating richer associations and greater room for expansion beyond a single offering. Customers rarely retain every feature of competing offers; instead, they simplify complexity through a limited set of mental shortcuts that help them recognise, compare and choose between alternatives. Companies therefore compete not only for market share but for  a distinctive place in customers' mental associations.

Yet abstraction comes at a cost.

Move too far from the product, and customers may admire the narrative while remaining uncertain about what the company actually does. Stay too close to the product, and the proposition risks becoming interchangeable as competitors replicate features and functionality.

The challenge, then, is not to maximise abstraction. It is to identify the highest level of abstraction that remains meaningful, credible and commercially useful. 

Not every company should climb the ladder indefinitely. In many categories, remaining closely tied to a distinctive capability or category is precisely what creates competitive advantage. The objective is not maximum abstraction. It is optimal abstraction.

The strategic question, in the end, is not simply what business a company is in. It is what comes to mind for the customer when a buying situation arises.

There is no universal answer. The appropriate level emerges from the interaction between three evolving realities: what customers value, what competitors already occupy, and what the organisation can credibly sustain. Customers change. Competitors reposition. Companies develop new capabilities, new products and new reputations. As all three shift, so does the appropriate level of abstraction; not because the original strategy was wrong, but because the underlying realities it was built on have moved.

The level of abstraction is not static

Apple illustrates one way this can play out. The company did not become associated with creativity or privacy simply because it declared those ideas in advertising. Those associations emerged through decades of product decisions, ecosystem design and customer experience- reinforced, but not created, by everything Apple said about them. 

A young software company shows the same dynamic earlier in its life. Such a company may initially need to compete on product functionality - feature depth, reliability, ease of integration - because that is where its credibility resides and where buyers are still forming their first impressions. As products mature, customer relationships deepen and reputation compounds, the company may earn the right to compete on broader business outcomes, or on emotional associations such as confidence and trust. Apple's trajectory and the software company's are the same story at different scales: positioning is not declared once and fixed, but earned and re-earned as the organisation changes.

This is why positioning requires strategic judgement informed by customer understanding, competitive insight and organisational capability, and alignment across the business, because positioning is reinforced, or undermined, by every interaction customers have with the organisation. Every product decision, sales conversation, customer interaction and marketing campaign either strengthens or weakens the same intended perception. Over time, repeated experience determines what customers instinctively reach for when choice presents itself.

Positioning, in the end, is not simply about inventing the most compelling story. It is about identifying the level of abstraction that best balances customer relevance, competitive distinctiveness and organisational credibility, and reinforcing that association so consistently, through products, behaviour and communication, that it becomes the one customers instinctively associate with the category itself.