How does competitive positioning relate to general positioning? What frameworks do you use to help the company understand the difference?

Competitive posititioning is a core element of product positioning. The primary architecture of brand and product-level positioning comes down to this:

• Audience: Who are you primarily building for and marketing to? 
• Pain/Enemy: What is their biggest pain point or problem?
• Solution: How do you address this problem?
• Differentiation: What makes your approach to solving this problem different and better?
• Urgency: Why is now an important right time to address this issue?

Competitive positioning lives under that differentiation bullet and it's the why behind your whole brand. The sharper and more defensible that is the better. You should not tackle specific competitors in the positioning doc, but you can broadly categorize them. For example, "Unlike clunky enterprise platforms, our platform is built for the way people work today."

Competitive positioning is basically a zoomed in version of your overall positioning. If you think of a competitive matrix, your overall positioning puts you on the map. How you're positioned versus a specific competitor zooms into the matrix and describes your exact position relative to this one other specific data point. Also, all positioning is competitive in a world where you have competitors.

Not everyone in your company will understand the difference and that's ok. When I think about enabling positioning for the company, I just want them to understand the concept and why it's so important. They don't need to get too deep into the PMM terminology.

When your company only has one product, the product positioning is the company positioning. The next growth phase would be a portfolio of products. Say we are are the professional services cloud with one product for accountants another for consultants another for lawyers and finally one for bankers. Here the value offered by the product can differ to the value of the company or brand in other words. the idea should be 1+1+1+1=5. Finally, when you have multiple portfolios the issue becomes more one of what impact are you having on your community irrespective of your portfolio or product

Ideally you are not basing your overall positioning based solely on how your competitors position themselves. That said, you (or more likely sales) will inevitably be asked for comparisons. The best approach to this is to have a solid set of unique value propositions (UVPs) for your company - these can be product related or include other things like services only you offer or industries you specialize in. Once you have these UVPs agreed on, then you can start to create some competitive positioning materials that relate to these UVPs. But the UVPs should come first.

One framework I've found helpful especially for sales is the MUD framework - what is meaningful, unique and defensible. Your UVPs can then be placed side by side with some competitive positioning in the defensible column. The MUD framework can go into your battlecards or a cheat sheet or whatever else you use to train sales on how to position against competitors. That way the company will be able to talk about your UVPs but also have talking points on how to position those against competitors.

Positioning reflects what your company uniquely provides a specific audience in a particular market.  It shouldn’t require multiple facets like general and competitive positioning.  

That said if you are finding that your audience is comparing you against one competitor in particular you can find ways to do comparisons on value, features, pricing, ROI, time to value, and other metrics in a direct comparison chart, through case studies or calculators, or with enablement to your sales team.  But you could be doing more harm than good in pursuing this as you’re giving competitors air time.

Both competitive positioning and general positioning start with the customer in a specific target market and the problem they face. Dig deep into the problem and understand why it hurts so bad. 

General Positioning: In general positioning, you’re articulating how your product fits in the overall market (including partner vendors, competitors, etc.). It gives context to the customer in regards to how and when they would buy the product.

Competitive Positioning: In competitive positioning, you're helping the customer understand how your product differs from other vendors.

Example: McDonalds (bear with me on this, obviously I am not a McDonalds expert!). In General Positioning, we can say that McDonalds offers fast and tasty food to super hungry folks who are in a hurry and don’t want to get out of their cars, but they want something they are familiar with anywhere they go. They don’t want to spend time thinking about the menu options. This defines the market category for McDonalds and gives context to customers regarding how and why they would buy burgers. In Competitive Positioning, McDonalds articulates to customers how consistent they are relative to competitors, and that a customer can get that same tasty BigMac in San Francisco just as they can in Tokyo thanks to their commitment to a global menu. Unlike competitors, who may not be able to offer the same level of consistency due to their supply chain and logistics practices and overall approach to offering fast and tasty burgers.

Try this exercise for Competitive Positioning! Now you get to act like the customer and compare options. WEAR THE CUSTOMER'S SHOES! What's the problem you're trying to solve? How does each vendor attempt to solve the problem? Dig deep into HOW they do it from a technical perspective. Then determine what’s the value as a result of the “HOW” for each vendor. At the end of this exercise, you’ll see the differentiator for your own product. Use that differentiator as an input to craft your competitive positioning.

These aren't different things. Competitive is part of overall positioning. 

Product positioning should include evidence, details and decisions based on: 

- Competitive intelligence 

- Pricing decisions 

- Market need

- Market potential 

- Your product and, based on the above, its differentiators

- The value proposition and mission that your teams establish, based on the above