In this post:
What exactly is brand positioning?
Why do so many brands struggle with positioning?
Brand positioning vs. brand identity: what is the difference?
What does a strong brand position actually look like?
What is the business impact of getting positioning right?
How does Murmur approach brand positioning?
Where should you start if your positioning is not clear?

What is Brand Positioning and Why Does it Matter?

One of the most common problem brands come to us with is a lack of clear positioning⁠, and it usually shows up in one of two ways.

The first is inconsistency. Multiple touchpoints, multiple teams, and multiple ideas about what the brand means and who it is for. Somewhere along the way, they stopped building toward something consolidated and memorable and started taking lots of different positions instead. No single one of them sticks.

The second is almost opposite. Some brands talk about themselves consistently and constantly but never connect what they are doing to why someone should care. They are clear on their identity. They are just not taking a position.

Brand positioning is how you connect who you are with why audiences should care. If you do not have a reason audiences should care, the short answer is: they will not.

So what exactly is brand positioning?

It is hard to define in a single sentence, because a good position does several things simultaneously.

Brand positioning is an essentialized statement of what you offer that works on a brand-wide level, is desirable to your audiences, and represents something you do better than your competition.

If it only does one or two of those things, it is not working. A lot of brands have a clear sense of who they are but have not connected that to what audiences actually want or how they are different from competitors. That gap is where positioning falls apart.

Why do so many brands struggle with this?

Positioning is hard because it requires internal alignment, a real understanding of your audiences, and honest clarity about what you actually do better than competitors. That level of self-awareness takes work, and it often benefits from outside perspective to help you see things clearly.

It is also not fixed. Audiences change. Competitive landscapes shift. Categories get disrupted. A position that worked three years ago might not be advantageous today. Unlike organizational values or mission, positioning reacts to the market. It needs to be revisited periodically.

Two patterns come up most often in the brands that come to us.

Growing brands often start with a very clear vision. When a brand’s entire intent lives inside one person’s head, the position is naturally clear. The founder knows exactly what need they created the brand to address. But brands grow organically from there. Product lines get added, new audiences get identified, marketing teams and agencies come in with their own ideas about how to connect with different people. A lot of things get tried. There comes a point where you have to rein it back in to reach the next level of growth⁠.

A hypothetical but common version of this: a wellness supplement brand that starts with a founder’s vision of clean, functional products for busy parents. Over five years, it expands into pre-workout formulas, kids’ vitamins, and pet supplements. Each line has its own tagline, its own audience, its own messaging approach. The founder is still clear on the vision internally, but externally the brand reads as three or four different brands sharing a logo. The next stage of growth requires deciding what they actually stand for across all of it.

Larger established brands often had a position that was working, with clear audiences and a defined competitive set. Then the category gets disrupted, a new competitor takes share, or what their audiences are looking for shifts. They realize the position that got them here is no longer advantageous, and they need to course correct.

A hypothetical but common version of this: a legacy household cleaning brand that owned “trusted and effective” for decades. Then a wave of new competitors enters the category positioning around clean ingredients and environmental responsibility, and consumer expectations shift. “Trusted and effective” becomes table stakes. The position that built the brand no longer differentiates it, and they need to figure out what their next territory is.

Brand positioning vs. brand identity: what is the difference?

Positioning creates a specific mental territory you are trying to claim in the minds of your audiences. It is an idea, articulated with words.

Brand identity⁠ is how that idea gets brought to life through design, consumer-facing messaging, activations, environments, and anywhere else the brand expresses itself.

Positioning should be defined before identity. They are sequential, not interchangeable.

When you skip positioning and jump straight to identity, two things tend to happen. First, you have no North Star for evaluating design directions. Decisions become purely subjective taste calls, or things that feel authentic to internal stakeholders but leave out the person the message is actually for. Second, you can end up with an identity that steers you into a position by default based on its look and feel, and that default position may not be the right one. An identity could feel serious and trustworthy when your category audience is actually looking for something exciting and playful, or vice versa.

What a strong brand position actually looks like

It is specific

Specificity is what makes a position actually work.

When brands struggle to build a position that is brand-wide, desirable, and differentiated all at once, they sometimes get vague. They land on things like “premium” or “quality” or “integrity.” Those do not work because they do not separate you from the competition. They are table stakes for getting considered. And you do not want to just be considered. You want to be chosen and remembered.

One of the key drivers of brand growth is mental availability, meaning being the brand that comes to mind in a buying situation. Memorability is central to that. A position can technically meet all three criteria and still fail if it is too generic or too similar to competitors, because it will not stick.

Take the “Liquid Death” sparkling water brand as an example. A vague position for the brand might be: “Pure, refreshing hydration for anyone who wants a healthier beverage option.” A specific position might be: “For people who are tired of wellness culture taking itself so seriously, we make choosing water feel more like cracking open a beer than making a sacrifice.”

We may not know Liquid Death’s exact positioning statement, but we would guess it looks much closer to the second one. That specificity, paired with an identity that brought it to life in a bold way, is a big part of how they stood out in the sparkling water category.

You cannot claim the whole field. You have to choose a position on the field, plant a flag, and say “this is what we offer.” That is what people respond to.

It resonates with the right audience

How we approach audience fit depends on what inputs we have. At a minimum, we establish behavioral audience profiles and make our best informed estimate we can about which profiles have the most opportunity for growing the brand. Usually, those are lighter users rather than your most loyal following. We make resonating with that group the priority when crafting the positioning statement.

A common concern is that building a message to bring in new audiences will alienate the people already buying. But evidence from brand growth research shows that as long as the new message does not do a complete reversal on existing buyers, your current consumers are going to keep buying. Focusing on a specific audience helps you find a more specific position that actually leads to growth, rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

With larger brands or more in-depth data, this can be sharpened significantly. Qualitative research helps you understand audience needs and what triggers them to think about buying your type of product. Quantitative research helps you identify the largest opportunity audience based on how frequently they already buy in your category and how large that group is.

It is different from the competition

Differentiation is not about being unique. Nothing is truly unique, and even if something is unique right now, if it is an advantage, it will get copied. So uniqueness is not a useful long-term goal.

Differentiation is about being more of something than your competitors, or having something stand out about you that does not stand out in the same way about them. It is about difference in the average person’s mind, not absolute uniqueness.

A big part of finding what makes you different is understanding who you are in the landscape with and what they are already claiming. It does not necessarily matter whether they live up to their claims. If competitors are clearly hanging their hat on something and people are buying them, they likely own that thing.

Once you know what everyone is owning and claiming, you look critically at all the positions being taken and try to identify the ones that are not. We call this white space. It could be something competitors treat as a lower priority, or something nobody is claiming at all. You are looking for that sweet spot: something notable about your brand that nobody else is owning. Those are the kinds of differences you surface and then evaluate whether they are strong enough to be elevated into your positioning.

One more thing worth noting. Even if you have not formally defined a position, if you have consumers, you already mean something to them. It can be helpful to understand what position you actually occupy in their minds before trying to claim a new one. Research helps identify this. If you are an established brand, your current perception matters, because sometimes brands try to position themselves too far from how they are already perceived, and that creates dissonance.

The business impact of getting positioning right

When you have a clear position that meets all the criteria, and your team is aligned on it, everything marketing-related downstream gets easier.

Internally, you have a new North Star. You get less indecisive feedback, more productive meetings, a better shared language for talking about what feels on brand or off brand. It streamlines decision-making. Once everyone is pulling in the same direction, you can go much further and much faster as a brand.

On the business side, a clear position helps you reach and convert more buyers, particularly lighter users and new category entrants who represent the biggest growth opportunity. If you have done your positioning well, these will be the kinds of consumers that meaningfully grow your brand’s penetration and overall sales.

Stronger, more memorable brands also tend to have more pricing power. A clearer position can mean your brand commands higher prices.

How we approach positioning at Murmur

Positioning always comes before design. Sometimes it is part of a larger strategy project⁠ that includes brand foundation pieces like mission, vision, values⁠, naming, or tagline. Sometimes it is a standalone process.

It always starts with good quality inputs. The strongest positioning work is grounded in evidence about how the brand is actually performing in the market. At the beginning of projects, we ask clients to share anything they have that might be relevant. The kinds of data we look for include category and segment growth trends, brand health tracking, distinctive asset audits, category entry point research, non-branded web search query data, competitive share and share of voice, and consumer perception research.

Not every brand has access to all of this, and not every project requires it. But the more evidence we can bring in, the more confident we can be that the position we are recommending is one that will actually grow the brand rather than just feel right internally. If not much is available, we sometimes conduct qualitative or quantitative research, or review existing category data and trends.

Once we have gathered inputs, we conduct our own strategic review of the competitive landscape and meet the client in a positioning workshop. This is where we dive deeper on your audiences, competitors, and the white space we identified in our initial audit. These workshop conversations are crucial. They help us understand the nuances of the client’s landscape and build internal alignment for the client team as well.

After the workshop, we put together our positioning recommendations. Sometimes that is one fully fleshed-out position if there was clear alignment. Sometimes it is a few options if exploring multiple positions would be helpful for discussion. We present to the client and then work collaboratively to integrate their feedback for the strongest possible result.

Not every client needs the same style of positioning statement or the same depth of process. We align our approach and deliverables to what is going to work best for each brand, meeting them where they are in their journey.

A client walks away with a clear position that connects to audiences and stakes claim to a distinct territory in the competitive landscape, so that future branding and marketing work can be aligned and effective.

Where to start if your positioning is not clear

Do not panic.

Whether you have a clearly articulated positioning statement or not, every brand has a position. It just may not be as effective as it could be.

If you do not have one articulated, start by trying to say what your brand offers to people that is desirable and distinct from competitors in one sentence. Then ask a few colleagues the same question and see if they say the same thing.

If everyone is fairly aligned, write that sentence down. You will have at least a starting point for evaluating whether it meets the criteria described above and whether it is specific enough to be memorable.

If people are not aligned, or it does not meet the criteria, it is likely time to take a closer look at your audiences and competitive landscape and find a stronger position.

If you are not sure where to start and want a second opinion, Murmur offers a free intro call⁠. We are happy to share our thoughts.

A note on our sources

Murmur’s approach to branding is shaped by decades of hands-on experience across categories, along with a wide range of research and frameworks that inform how we think about brand growth. In this post, we drew particularly on the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, including Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow and Jenni Romaniuk’s research on distinctive brand assets and brand health. Mark Ritson’s writing on positioning and relative differentiation also shapes how we approach this work. If you want to go deeper on any of the ideas above, those are useful places to start.

Murmur Creative is a brand strategy and creative agency⁠ based in Portland, Oregon. We help brands find and articulate the position that is going to move them forward.