The slide had eleven logos on it.
Standard two by two. Premium to accessible across the bottom, traditional to modern up the side, every competitor plotted, and our client sitting alone in the open quadrant, which is how these maps always end, because whoever draws the axes also decides who wins. Somebody asked whether we had missed a twelfth brand. We spent nine minutes on that. Nobody asked the other question.
The other question is this. Of the people in this category who could plausibly buy something, how many bought nothing at all last year?
For that client it was sixty-one percent.
Your biggest competitor has no logo, no pricing page, and no marketing budget, and it is currently taking most of the category.
Doing nothing is a formidable product. It is free, it requires no approval, it carries no risk of looking foolish in front of a spouse or a finance director, and it never disappoints anybody, because it never promised anything. Every brand in your competitive set is fighting over the sliver of the market that has already decided to act. The rest of the room is not choosing you over a rival. It is choosing the couch.
Positioning against rivals produces a certain kind of work. Feature grids. Faster, cheaper, more integrations, a little green check where the other guys have a dash. It is legible, it survives legal review, and it is completely inert to anyone who has not yet decided the problem is worth solving.
Positioning against inertia produces stakes instead. Liquid Death did not win by out canning other canned water. It won by naming the thing that actually happens, which is that you are at a party holding nothing and you would like to be holding something. Patagonia's Worn Wear made not buying a new jacket into the choice you had to justify, rather than the default nobody examines. In software, the version everyone forgets is that Slack's real rival was never a competing chat app. It was email, and email was doing fine.
So run the map again. Put inertia on it as a named competitor with a share number, and then answer the three questions you would answer about any rival. What does it offer that we do not. Who is it winning with right now. What would have to become true in a person's week for them to defect from it. If your strategy cannot answer the third one, you have written a comparison, not a position.
It is choosing the couch.
I think about this every other Saturday at karaoke, where the host calls everyone baby and the hard part is never the singing. It is the slip. There are always eight people at the bar who want to and will not, and no amount of arguing about song choice moves any of them.