What's your position in the market?

POSITIONING IS THAT EXCLUSIVE SPACE your brand owns in the marketplace. It's relevant and compelling to your customers, and different from your competitors.

Tryg Jacobson, who spends a lot of time on the positioning soapbox as chairman of Sheboygan's Jacobson Rost, gave me this definition:

"Positioning is the unique mental real estate a company must stake out and claim as their own. Once you own that mental real estate, no one else can."

I ask Tryg why a brand can own only one position. He says, "You can only have one position, one promise, because then everything you do and say always gets back to that one benefit.

"A brand is capable of delivering other benefits, but the focus should always be on the benefit that the brand is most identified with it, the benefit upon which trust and value are placed."

Determining what portion of mental real estate to grab in the 46-ounce brain of each and every constituent in the target market is agonizing for most brand managers. It's a call that can make or break a career.