A buyer facing a decision holds a very short list, usually assembled before any evaluation begins. Positioning is the question of what you occupy on that list, and whether the slot is one anybody wants filled.

The original claim

Al Ries and Jack Trout (1981, from articles first published in 1972) made the argument that named the field: the contest is not for the best product but for a location in the prospect's mindRies, A. & Trout, J. (1981). Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. McGraw-Hill. Their central observations: minds hold short ordered lists per category, the first entrant holds a durable advantage, and the reliable move for a later entrant is to create a category it can be first in rather than to compete on the leader's terms., which is crowded, ordered, and resistant to revision. Their practical conclusion — that a follower should redefine the category rather than argue superiority inside it — is the part that has survived, and it is the origin of category creation as a strategy.

Porter's correction, which is the important one

Michael Porter (1996) accepted the perceptual claim and then made it much harder to satisfy. Strategic position must be grounded in trade-offsPorter, M. E. (1996). 'What Is Strategy?' Harvard Business Review 74(6). Porter distinguishes operational effectiveness — doing the same activities better — from strategic positioning — doing different activities, or the same ones differently. Only the second is defensible, because only it forces competitors to give something up to imitate it.: performing different activities from rivals, or the same activities differently, in ways that are incompatible with the alternative. A position a competitor can copy without abandoning anything is not a position; it is a claim. The test is therefore not 'what do we say' but 'what have we chosen not to do, such that a competitor imitating us would have to stop doing something profitable'.

Richard Rumelt (2011) supplies the diagnostic test. A strategy is a diagnosis of the situation, a guiding policy, and coherent action — and a positioning statement that contains no diagnosis is a slogan. Most fail at the first step, describing an aspiration where the situation should be.

The objections

The perceptual framing is close to unfalsifiable. Any market outcome can be narrated as a positioning success or failure after the fact, and the literature is built almost entirely on retrospective cases selected because they worked. Ries and Trout's own examples are survivors, and the firms that occupied a clear position and failed anyway do not appear.

The second objection is that positioning is treated as a decision when it is substantially an outcome. What a market believes about a firm is produced over years by what the firm actually does and who it actually serves; the statement usually documents a position that has already formed. Written in advance it is a hypothesis, and treating it as an act of will is the standard error.

What it rules out

It rules out any statement a competitor could also make. It rules out breadth — occupying several slots is occupying none, since the list is short and ordered. And it rules out operational excellence as a position, which is Porter's core point: doing the same things better is a race every entrant can run.

It does not rule out changing position. It rules out changing it by announcement, since the asset is in the buyer's memory and is rebuilt by repetition and evidence.

Sources

Porter, M. E. (1980). Competitive Strategy. Free Press. · Porter, M. E. (1996). 'What Is Strategy?' Harvard Business Review 74(6). · Ries, A. & Trout, J. (1981). Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. McGraw-Hill. · Rumelt, R. (2011). Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. Crown.