Glossary / Positioning map
Positioning map
A view of where competing products sit in the customer's mind along the dimensions buyers actually care about — used to find a defensible gap before building.
Introduced in Chapter 14 — The Right to Compete of Tangibles.
Related terms
- Perceptual map — A chart of how the market perceives competing products across two feature dimensions — reflecting the customer's mind, not the maker's intent.
- Positioning audit — A disciplined check of a product's market position that can catch a doomed concept before significant capital is committed.
- Unboxing — The customer's first physical encounter with a product out of its package — a designed moment of first impression, not an afterthought.
- Pre-production unit — A near-final unit built on production-representative processes to surface the problems that appear only at manufacturing scale, before full launch.