Positioning map: map your competitors and find the gap

A positioning map places competitors on a two-axis chart according to the choices they have made in public: what they charge, who they say they serve, what they promise. This version builds it from each competitor's own website, pricing page and ads, so it takes an afternoon and needs no survey.

It answers a different question from a perceptual map, which plots how buyers see brands. A positioning map shows where each rival has chosen to stand. Build it first: it is free, and it tells you which gaps are worth testing with buyers.

Choose two dimensions buyers choose on

The map is only as good as its axes. Here are the dimensions that work most often, and where the evidence sits on a competitor's site.

Pick two that pass three tests:

1. Buyers decide on it. It appears in lost deal reasons or in reviews.
2. The two are independent. Price and audience size often move together; if they do, you get a diagonal line, not a map.
3. Rivals visibly differ on it. If everyone scores a 3, it is not a dimension in this market.

The positioning map template

Write the rubric before you score anyone. Without it, you will score generously wherever it suits you.

Then the evidence sheet, one row per company:

Score yourself from your own public website with the same rubric, not from your strategy deck. The distance between where your site puts you and where you meant to be is often the first finding.

Competitor positioning map example

Say you run a hypothetical CRM for small real estate brokerages, Keystone, at $79 per user a month. You map it against five rivals on price (read from each pricing page) and specialism.

The specialism rubric: 1 generic CRM with no real estate content; 2 generic, with a real estate template; 3 sells to many industries but has real estate integrations and pages; 4 real estate only, CRM is one module of a bigger suite; 5 real estate only, built around listings, showings and transactions.

All six are invented. Plotted (K is Keystone):

Specialist
 5 |                 K A
 4 |                         B
 3 |
 2 |              D
 1 | E    C
   +----------------------------
    $0    $30   $60   $90  $120
         Price per user a month

What the map says:

• The specialists cluster between $79 and $120. Keystone sits $10 below Rival A with the same score. On this map, they are almost the same product.
• The generalists sit between $0 and $65, and the cheap end is crowded with tools that do nothing specific for agents.
• The top left is empty. No one offers a real estate specialist CRM under about $40.

Is the gap real? Four tests

1. Is there demand? Look for buyers asking for it. In the example, that would be solo agents on Reddit asking for a cheaper real estate CRM, or Rival A's reviews complaining about the price for one-person teams.

2. Did someone try it and leave? Check the rivals' pricing history in the Wayback Machine. Suppose Rival A had a $35 solo tier in 2024 and removed it in 2025. Find out why before you copy it: support costs and poor upgrade rates are the usual reasons.

3. Can you make money there? At $35 a user, onboarding has to be self-serve. If solo agents need the same hand-holding as brokerages, the gap is a trap.

4. Do buyers care about both axes? Ten customer calls, or a quick perceptual survey, will tell you whether specialism matters to solo agents as much as it does to brokerages.

In the example, the decision is not to reposition Keystone. It is to test a self-serve solo tier at $39 with a landing page and a small ad budget before building anything. A gap that survives all four tests is what a white space analysis is looking for.

Mistakes that ruin a positioning map

Plotting your intentions. Score what your website says today, not what next quarter's rebrand will say.

Too many companies. Five to eight. Beyond that, labels overlap and nobody reads it.

Axes chosen after you saw the chart. Pick dimensions from buyer evidence first, then plot. Choosing axes that happen to put you alone in a corner proves nothing.

Treating it as permanent. Positions move whenever a rival adds a tier, removes one, or rewrites its homepage for a new audience.

Keeping the map current

Re-score the map quarterly. Once you have chosen where to stand, write it down as a positioning statement; these positioning statement examples show the format, and the definition of competitive positioning covers the choices behind it.

Figo records changes to each competitor's pricing page and new pages every week, which flags when a rival is moving on your map: a new cheaper tier, a new industry landing page, a rewritten headline. Ours, so judge accordingly. It will not draw the map or choose your axes.