Positioning vs perception

How to identify your gap

If your intended brand positioning and actual perception don’t match, your marketing and communication will feel harder than it should. No matter how much you do.

You might have a clear idea of how you want your brand to be perceived. What you stand for, how you are different, where you sit in the market, etc.

But if you asked ten people outside your business to describe you, or place you next to your competitors, would they say the same thing?

In most cases, they wouldn’t. And it is in that gap is where your true positioning actually lives.

Your intention vs the actuality

When talking about positioning it is important to talk about perception. The easiest way I can explain the difference is that positioning is the intended perception you want people to have, while perception is how people actually see you. Positioning is something you strategically work to build, and people’s perception is something you cannot control.

So when I in a workshop draw a matrix on the whiteboard and ask you to place where you think you are positioned in the market compared to your competitors, this is the positioning map. But if we then go and ask someone on the street how they would place your brand compared to the alternatives they can think of, this is the perception map.

Very often you’ll see that these two maps won’t align perfectly. This is completely normal. This is because people interpret it through what they already know.

Everyone have their own thoughts, beliefs, experiences, associations and expectations. Whether those beliefs and expectations are accurate or not, these are all things you cannot control. When someone encounters your brand, they are not just seeing the brand. They are filtering, simplifying and placing it into something familiar so it makes senses to them. This is why perception rarely matches the intended position.

At first glance, this can seem confronting. But this gives you something you can actually work with. Real signals of how you’re being perceived and understood in the market.

Tendencies tell

If you ask people to place you on the map, you might start to notice some tendencies in their perceptions of you. Maybe you find that a lot of people are placing you in the upper right area. Maybe you see that a majority is placing you somewhere close along the x-axis. These are all valuable information .

A question that needs to be asked however is; does this aligns with what we want? It is a beneficial perception or is it the opposite of what we are wanting to create?

Yes, it aligns? Amazing, keep up the good work!

No? Then this is a signal. It means the way you think you’re showing up, isn’t how you’re actually landing. It means:

• The right people might never find you, or worse overlook you.

• The wrong people might be the only one finding you, and then get frustrated when they realize you’re not what they thought you were.

• Your message is working harder than it needs to, and you have to over-explain everything instead of leaving room for fun creativity.

• You’re likely compensating with more content, more effort, higher marketing budget, which steals valuable time and energy from other aspects of your business.

Over time, this will create frustration. You’re working sooo hard, but it is not quite clicking. Not because your work isn’t good enough, but because its not clearly positioned in a way that people recognize and chose!

Making sense of the pattern and deciding what can be done to make sure you land where you want to land in peoples mind is the kind of work we would do together in a deep-dive project.

The messy middle

If you’re finding yourself in the middle, it’s usually not just a messaging problem, but a positioning problem. These are often the brands that feel like they don’t really know what to say or how to make people see the value without losing them 5 minutes in to the explanation.

Positioning isn’t something you fix by tweaking words. It requires stepping back and getting clear on:

• What category you’re actually playing in

• What you are competing against, whether you realize it or not

• What makes you meaningfully different in that landscape

When this comes through clearly in your messaging, you will likely experience that you don’t have to work so hard to chase people, but that the right people will start coming to you.

This is exactly the kind of work I would do in deep-dive projects focused on positioning and selling points. In these strategic sessions we don’t just adjust what you communicate, but clarify where you stand in the first place - so you can get out of the messy middle.

The ping-pong pattern

If you ask people to place you on the map and they all place you on wildly different sides of the map, this means your brand is inconsistent. When your brand is experienced in multiple, conflicting ways, the problem usually isn’t creativity or level of activity — it’s direction. Without a clear internal anchor, your communication starts to adapt to everything and everyone. And over time, that makes your brand confusing and harder to understand.

Getting out of this pattern requires more than creativity and consistency. It requires clarity.

If this is the case for you, having a clear direction and focused mission, will help you stay consistent and clear in your messaging so you will create one strong and lasting impressions, instead of two or more.

You need to know:

• Who you are, and who you’re not

• What value you create, and for whom

• What you want to be known for over time, and why

This is the kind of clarity we build in a deep-dive project focused on brand strategy. Not just so you can communicate better, but so you can communicate from somewhere true to you!

The end-goal

The goal isn’t to control perception perfectly, because you can’t. But you can reduce the gap between what you intend and what people actually take away. And when that gap gets smaller, something shifts.

Your message becomes easier to understand. Your value becomes easier to recognize. And your brand starts doing more of the work for you. Not because you’re saying more, but because you’re finally being seen more clearly.

Essentially, you can lean back a little and let them come to you 🧡