What is competitive positioning?

Competitive positioning is positioning done explicitly against the alternatives: defining for whom your product wins, against which rivals, and on what dimension — price, depth, ease, focus. Where general product positioning describes your value, competitive positioning locates it on the map buyers actually use when comparing options.

Good competitive positioning is choosing, not claiming: you pick the segment and trade-off where you genuinely beat the specific alternatives in your deals, and concede the rest. It decays as competitors reposition and reprice, so the map needs the same monitoring cadence as anything else in competitive intelligence.