Positioning Before Design: The Research Stage Most Branding Agencies Skip

Positioning has a publishing history that most decks ignore. Jack Trout published on the subject in Industrial Marketing in 1969, Trout and Al Ries followed in Advertising Age in 1972, and their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind appeared in 1981. The book's framing is an organised system for finding a window in the mind, which is a claim about attention rather than about design.

The practice predates the literature. David Ogilvy described positioning a Saab in 1961, before any of those articles existed, and scholars argue the idea was in use through the 1950s. Stephen A. Fox's assessment, as recorded in the subject's encyclopedia entry, is that Ries and Trout “resurrected the concept and made it their trademark”. Attribution matters less than the practical consequence: a studio that treats positioning as a 1981 invention will look for a single clever claim, while the record shows brands as early as the 1950s and 1960s — Lipton, Kraft and Tide among them — building positioning statements around form, package size and price that then guided packaging, promotion and advertising.

That is the useful precedent for a developer or a brokerage. The statement came first and the visible work followed it, which is the reverse of how most identity projects are scheduled.

The classic school asks a brand to own a single differentiated claim, and the newer research rejects the premise. Ehrenberg-Bass's category entry points are described as the cues customers use to access memories when faced with a buying situation, both internal — motives and emotions — and external, such as location and time of day. The institute developed the framing in research with LinkedIn's B2B Institute, reported in June 2022.

Jenni Romaniuk, the institute's associate director for international matters, states the disagreement directly in that reporting: the approach is contrary to the idea of positioning as finding the one thing you can own to be different from everybody. The method that follows is breadth rather than focus: be present behind as many relevant doors into the category as possible, and link messaging to the buying situations that actually occur. The published work analysed the US insurance sector by counting category entry points per customer.

A property brand feels this disagreement in its own numbers. Buyers arrive through different doors — a school district, an investment yield, a commute, a lifestyle move, a place to retire — and a statement built around one of those doors will be silent at the other four. That is the practical version of the argument, and it is why the research stage produces a list before it produces a claim.

It helps to separate what the document decides from what no amount of design can repair, because committees often ask a visual language to answer a strategic question.

The research stage is not a mood board with quotations pinned to it. It answers three questions in writing: which buying situations bring a customer into this category, which of those situations the business can credibly serve, and what proof exists when the claim is challenged at a sales desk.

Category entry point research is the most rigorous published answer to the first question, and it is deliberately not brand-centric. The institute's premise is that buyers move through many situations, so the work is to map them and then decide which ones the brand can own rather than to pick one slogan and hope it travels. Its instruments follow from that: a Laws of Growth analysis that identifies how a brand competes, an exercise for identifying and prioritising category entry points, and a cohesion analysis for portfolios.

A team that runs this stage honestly will produce a document with fewer adjectives than the ones that usually circulate. That is the point. Every question above can be answered with evidence, and none of them can be answered with a typeface.

The map below places schools of practice rather than companies, because the published sources describe methods and not any single brand's position. Read the axes as the two arguments the article is comparing.

The two named schools sit in the upper half of the map for the same reason: both are decided in writing before a visual language exists. They differ along the horizontal axis, on whether the work organises around one owned claim or around the range of buying situations the brand intends to cover.

The clearest sentence in a positioning document is a refusal. A developer who will not sell to short-term investors, a studio that will not take work it cannot staff, a brokerage that will not compete on commission: each refusal removes ground a competitor is standing on and makes the remaining promise easier to prove.

April Dunford's Obviously Awesome is described on her own site as the book on how to get positioning done, presenting a process used by hundreds of growing B2B technology companies. That is the author's claim about her own work, and it carries its own boundary: the stated population is B2B technology companies. A consumer real estate team can import the mechanism — write it down, choose deliberately, make it testable — while treating the evidence base as belonging somewhere else.

The older literature is equally firm that positioning is not a slogan. The published history runs from a 1969 trade article through the 1972 pieces to the 1981 book, and in that account the statement guides packaging, promotion and advertising. A tagline is one output of the decision. When a committee starts with the tagline, it has already skipped the stage this article is about.

Positioning documents are argued about in meeting rooms and settled by rooms like these, where somebody already decided who the place is for. The three photographs below are ordinary evidence of that downstream work, offered as images rather than as claims about the businesses in them.

Positioning enters valuation models as an input rather than an outcome. Brand Finance's brand strength scoring is a balanced scorecard that includes emotional connection, financial performance and sustainability, and the resulting score is converted into a royalty rate inside its model. That is one documented route from perception to a figure, and it is why the research stage has a financial audience.

It also reaches portfolio decisions. Aaker and Joachimsthaler's article in California Management Review, published on 1 August 2000, frames brand architecture as a set of relationships between brands, which only makes sense after the positioning of each brand is settled — the argument behind our piece on brand architecture for developers.

In this market the effect is visible in what gets built. Knight Frank's Global Branded Residence Survey records the sector growing from 169 schemes in 2011 to 611 live schemes in 2025, and names two demand drivers behind the growth, one of them developers' appetite for premium positioning. Positioning, on that evidence, is not a document that floats above the business. It is one of the reasons certain products exist at all.

1. Write the refusal section first.A positioning that forbids nothing will be ignored by the sales team within a quarter, and it cannot be defended when a competitor attacks.
2. Start from buying situations, not adjectives.Ehrenberg-Bass describes a category entry point as the cue customers use to access memories when faced with a buying situation.
3. Decide how many doors you intend to stand behind.The institute's research with LinkedIn's B2B Institute, reported in June 2022, argues for breadth rather than one owned claim.
4. Fit the method to the market.April Dunford's process is described for hundreds of growing B2B technology companies, which is a narrower population than a family buying a home.
5. Check that the claim can be proved at handover.Brand Finance's strength scoring mixes perception with financial performance, which is the same demand a buyer makes at the sales desk.
6. Settle positioning before the portfolio.Aaker and Joachimsthaler's 2000 brand relationship spectrum frames architecture as relationships between brands, which only works when each one knows what it is.