Market Position: Where Do You Actually Stand?

Most companies can tell you who their competitors are. Very few can tell you why they're winning or losing against them. Even fewer can tell you whether their position is getting stronger or weaker right now, today, while they're sitting in this meeting talking about it.

Competitive positioning isn't a slide with a 2x2 matrix and your logo in the upper right corner. It's an honest answer to a brutal question: if you disappeared tomorrow, how hard would it be for your customers to replace you? If the answer is "not very" — you don't have a position. You have a presence. Those are different things.

This skill runs a competitive positioning diagnostic. It's not strategy formulation — that's Playing to Win's job. This is the X-ray that tells you what you're working with before you start making choices. You can't choose where to play and how to win if you don't know where you actually stand.

Loading Company Context

Before starting, look for a company-context.md file. Read it if available, focusing on: competitive landscape, customer segments, current strategy, and how-to-win claims.

If you find context, build a first-pass position map and present it to the user to argue with. A draft you disagree with is more useful than a blank page you're staring at politely.

If no context is available, ask:

• "What's the business, and what do you sell to whom?"
• "Who do you lose deals to most often? Who keeps you up at night?"
• "Has something changed recently — a new competitor, a price war, customers behaving differently?"

Three Modes

This skill runs in three modes depending on where you are:

Diagnostic Mode (First Use)

Full competitive positioning assessment. Work through all six sections below. This is the deep version — expect it to take time and to surface things people would rather not say out loud.

Review Mode

Quick check-in for an existing position assessment. Ask:

• "Has the competitive landscape shifted since we last mapped it?"
• "Any new entrants, exits, or mergers?"
• "Have you won or lost any significant customers? Why?"
• "Has your pricing power changed — up or down?"

Update the relevant sections. Don't redo the whole thing unless something fundamental has moved.

Alert Triggers

Specific signals that should trigger a full reassessment:

• A competitor raises significant funding or makes a major acquisition
• A customer you considered locked-in switches to a competitor
• A new entrant from an adjacent industry shows up in your market
• Your win rate on competitive deals drops more than 10 percentage points
• A substitute product starts appearing in customer conversations
• A major customer starts building the capability you sell them in-house
• Pricing pressure appears that you can't explain through normal market cycles

If any of these have happened, skip Review mode and go straight to Diagnostic.

Section 1: Who Are You Actually Competing With?

Most companies define their competitive set too narrowly. They list the three companies that sell the same thing and call it done. That's like a restaurant saying their competition is other restaurants, while their customers are increasingly ordering delivery, cooking at home, or skipping meals.

Map four layers of competition:

Direct competitors: Same product, same market, same customers. These are the ones you see in deals. Name them. Rank them by how often you actually encounter them.

Indirect competitors: Different product, same problem. They solve the customer's underlying need a different way. A CRM company's indirect competitor isn't just other CRMs — it's the spreadsheet, the notebook, the sales manager's memory. These are often more dangerous than direct competitors because they're invisible in your pipeline data.

Substitutes: Different approach entirely. The customer solves the problem by doing something you wouldn't normally consider competitive. Videoconferencing wasn't competing with airlines until suddenly it was. What's the version of that in your market?

Non-consumption: The customer does nothing. They live with the problem. This is often the biggest competitor of all, especially for newer categories. If 70% of your addressable market has decided the problem isn't worth solving, that tells you something important about your value proposition.

Ask:

• "When you lose a deal, who do you lose it to — and I mean specifically, not 'the market'?"
• "When prospects go dark and stop responding, what do they end up doing instead?"
• "Is there a way customers solve this problem that you'd never put on a competitor slide?"

Section 2: Where Do You Play?

Map the actual arena. Not where you'd like to play — where you're actually competing today, with real revenue and real customers.

Break it down across:

• Segments: Which customer types, sizes, industries? Where is your revenue actually concentrated vs. where your sales deck says you serve?
• Channels: How do customers find and buy from you? Direct sales, partners, digital, word of mouth?
• Geographies: Where are you? Where aren't you? Is that a choice or an accident?
• Value chain position: What part of the customer's problem do you own? Are you the whole solution or a component?

The key question is whether your where-to-play is a deliberate choice or just where you ended up. There's a big difference between "we focus on mid-market manufacturing" and "we mostly sell to mid-market manufacturers because that's who our first three salespeople knew." One is strategy. The other is history pretending to be strategy.

Ask:

• "If you drew a box around the 80% of revenue that's most similar — same type of customer, same use case, same buying process — what would that box look like?"
• "Where are you winning that you didn't plan to be? Where did you plan to win but aren't?"
• "Is there a segment you're avoiding? Why — is it strategic, or just uncomfortable?"

Section 3: How Do You Win (Or Not) in Each Arena?

This is where most positioning conversations get soft. "We win because of our quality and our people and our relationships." Sure. So does everyone else. That's not a competitive advantage — that's table stakes described enthusiastically.

There are two ways to win. Only two. Everything else is a remix:

Cost advantage: You deliver at a cost structure competitors genuinely can't match. Not because you try harder or squeeze margins — because something structural about your business makes you fundamentally cheaper. IKEA wins on cost not because they're stingy but because they redesigned the entire value chain around flat-packing and customer self-service. That's structural. "We're efficient" is not.

Differentiation: You deliver something customers value enough to pay a premium for, or to choose you when a cheaper option exists. The differentiation has to be on dimensions the customer actually cares about — not dimensions you're proud of internally. Your engineering team's opinion of the product's elegance is irrelevant if the customer can't tell the difference.

For each arena you mapped in Section 2, ask:

• "Are you winning on cost or differentiation? Pick one. If you say both, you're probably winning on neither."
• "What specifically can you do that your closest competitor cannot? Not 'won't' — cannot."
• "If a competitor hired your best three people tomorrow, could they replicate your advantage? If yes, it's not structural — it's temporary."

Blue Ocean check: Is there an arena where you've made the competition irrelevant — where you've redefined what the customer is buying so that traditional competitors aren't even in the conversation? This is rare and usually accidental, but when it exists, it's your most valuable position. Protect it.

The stuck-in-the-middle test: Porter's most uncomfortable insight is that being average at everything is the worst possible position. If you're not the cheapest and not the most differentiated, you're in no-man's-land — competing on hope and customer inertia. That works until it doesn't. And when it stops working, it stops fast.

Section 4: Is Your Position Defensible?

Having a good position today means nothing if a well-funded competitor can take it from you in 18 months. Defensibility is about the moat — what makes your position expensive, slow, or impossible to copy.

Test the moat across five dimensions:

Switching costs: How painful is it for a customer to leave you? Not "they like us" — actual pain. Data migration, retraining, integration rebuilding, relationship loss. If switching is easy, your retention is just inertia, and inertia runs out.

Network effects: Does your product get better as more people use it? If yes, that's a moat that deepens over time. If no, you're competing on features forever, and features get copied.

Scale advantages: Does being bigger make you meaningfully better or cheaper? Some businesses have genuine scale economics — each additional unit costs less to produce or serve. Others just get bigger without getting better. Know which one you are.

Proprietary assets: Do you own something — IP, data, relationships, regulatory approvals — that a new entrant would struggle to replicate? "Relationships" only counts if they're genuinely locked-in, not just warm.

Brand and reputation: Would a customer choose you over an identical competitor purely because of who you are? Brand is a real moat, but it's thinner than most companies think. It takes years to build and can be neutralized by a competitor who's 20% cheaper.

Ask:

• "If a competitor with unlimited funding decided to take your best customer, what would stop them?"
• "What's the one thing about your position that would take a new entrant the longest to replicate?"
• "Be honest: is your moat getting deeper or shallower? What's the trend?"

Section 5: The Customer Perspective

Everything above is your view. Now flip it. What does the customer actually see?

Companies are consistently terrible at this because they confuse what they sell with what customers buy. You sell a software platform. The customer buys "not getting fired for picking the wrong vendor." You sell consulting hours. The customer buys "confidence that this decision won't blow up." The gap between what you think you're selling and what they're actually buying — that gap is where competitors sneak in.

Ask:

• "Why do your best customers choose you? Not your theory — have you actually asked them? What did they say, in their words?"
• "What would make your most loyal customer switch? Is there a price point, a feature, a competitor move that would do it?"
• "What alternatives is the customer actively aware of? Not your competitor list — their consideration set. Those are often different."
• "When a customer leaves, what reason do they give? And what's the real reason underneath it?"
• "If you asked your customers to describe what you do in one sentence, what would they say? Is it what you'd want them to say?"

The replacement test: If you went out of business on Friday, what would your customers do on Monday? If the answer is "call three other vendors and pick one by Wednesday" — your position is weaker than you think. If the answer is "panic, because nobody else does quite what they do" — you might actually have something defensible.

Section 6: Position Trajectory

A snapshot of competitive position is useful. A trajectory is essential. Are you getting stronger or weaker, and what's driving the direction?

Ask:

• "Compare your position today to two years ago. Are you more or less differentiated? More or less able to charge a premium?"
• "Is your win rate on competitive deals going up or down?"
• "Are your best people getting recruited by competitors, or are you recruiting theirs?"
• "Is the market moving toward you or away from you? Are trends in your industry making your strengths more or less relevant?"
• "What's the single biggest threat to your position over the next 2-3 years?"

The momentum question: "If nothing changes — same team, same strategy, same execution — where will your competitive position be in three years?" If the honest answer is "weaker," then the strategy conversation isn't optional. It's urgent.

After the Diagnostic

Synthesize the Position

Write a position statement — not a marketing tagline, a strategic one. Something like:

"We compete primarily in [segments] through [channels]. We win by [cost/differentiation mechanism]. Our position is defensible because of [moat]. The main threat is [specific threat]. Our trajectory is [strengthening/weakening] because [reason]."

If you can't write that paragraph, the positioning isn't clear enough yet. Go back to the sections that are vague.

Update Company Context

Update the Competitive landscape section in company-context.md with:

• Direct and indirect competitor list, ranked by threat level
• Current position summary (the paragraph above)
• Defensibility assessment (strong/moderate/weak with reasoning)
• Key threats and trajectory
• Date of assessment

Connect to Strategy Map

This diagnostic feeds directly into the strategy map's Delivery and Customers steps. The where-to-play and customer perspective sections define the bottom-up chain's customer value step. The how-to-win section defines what delivery capability needs to produce. If there's a mismatch between your competitive position and what the strategy map says you need — that's your gap.

Connect to Playing to Win

If the diagnostic reveals that your position is weak, undifferentiated, or eroding — that's a trigger to run the Playing to Win cascade. You can't fix competitive position through execution alone. You need to make different choices about where to play and how to win. The diagnostic tells you what's broken. Playing to Win tells you what to choose instead.

Time Guidance

Expect to spend at least 30 minutes on the full diagnostic. Competitive positioning is one of those things that benefits from sleeping on it. The first-pass answers are usually the comfortable ones. The real answers — the ones that change what you do — tend to surface after you've sat with the uncomfortable questions for a day or two.

If you're doing this with a leadership team, block 90 minutes and don't let anyone open a laptop. The value is in the conversation, not the document.

The market position diagnostic is applied here through the Eterdis competitive analysis framework — built from two decades of watching companies discover that their position wasn't what they thought it was. For a deeper engagement with your competitive positioning, visit eterdis.com or book a conversation at eterdis.com/contact.