Author: Todd Irwin
_Todd Irwin_
Reading time: 20 minutes
Synopsis
De-Positioning (2025) looks at how brands can win by showing what their competitors do badly. It also shows how they can clearly help customers with their biggest problems. The book says that to truly beat others, a business needs one clear plan that guides everything it does. It also explains that this plan only works if it is used in all parts of the business, in how they talk to people, and in how customers experience them.
What’s in it for me? Get a much better way to beat your rivals with the ideas of de-positioning.
Today, markets are busier, faster, and more crowded than ever. Every day, many brands say they are different, better, or very important. But most of these messages don’t stay in our minds. They get lost among many other promises. If you want your brand to stand out, you don’t just need to shout louder. You need to understand where the real chances are. You also need to create a plan that makes your brand easy to remember, trusted, and necessary.
In this summary, you will learn how to use the power of de-positioning. This is a careful way to find out what customers need, show what competitors do badly, and make every part of your business work towards one clear idea. You will learn how to make your brand much better than others by turning your rivals’ weaknesses into your strengths. This method helps you think more clearly about your plans. It helps you stop fighting for just a small part of the market. Instead, you can make other options seem unimportant because you offer the best solution.
Blink 1 – De-position or die
To succeed in busy markets, you first need to understand that most brands are trying to get customers to think of them in the same way. The old idea of finding “white space” – a completely empty part of the market – has mostly disappeared. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find any market area that big companies or new businesses haven’t touched. A smarter plan is not just to be a little different. It is to create and protect a space that is important, useful, and hard for rivals to fight against. This is where de-positioning comes in. This idea is all about finding a place where your brand can be seen as very important, not just different.
Being different just to be different can actually be risky. Many brands use fancy adverts, statements about what the brand stands for, or new ideas. But these often don’t work well if they don’t fix a real problem for customers. De-positioning changes the usual way of doing things. It needs a tough strategy way of thinking. This means looking at the market very carefully and clearly. You need to find exactly where current products or services are not good enough. You find an “enemy” – not a person, but an idea, a problem, or an old way of doing things that needs to change. By making your brand the answer to that “enemy,” you make the competition less important. You make them not matter.
Apple is a very clear example of this tough strategy in action.
It is easy to think that Apple’s success comes from only inventing new things. But their strong position actually comes from cleverly using what is called a second mover strategy. Apple rarely tries to be first. They did not invent the personal computer, the MP3 player, or the smartphone. They watched. They let competitors like IBM and Microsoft go first. These companies claimed to be the first, which often made things messy and hard to use for people. Apple saw the problems these first competitors caused – difficult screens, privacy issues, and things that didn’t work well together. Then, Apple came in with answers to those specific problems.
Apple did not win by finding empty market space. They looked at the space where PCs were and made them seem like boring, complicated machines for business people. They showed themselves as the better solution to the boring work of using computers.
This is the power of a tough strategy. It stops looking for new things just for the sake of it. Instead, it starts fixing the real problems customers have. To win today, stop trying to be unique. Start trying to be the best at solving problems.
Blink 2 – Make your customers the star
Understanding that de-positioning can be a good strategy is only the first step. After this, the real work begins. But you can make your journey much easier by following the ideas of a de-positioning approach.
The first idea is all about the customer. You must support them and fix their biggest problem. Your customers or clients must be the most important part of your business. So, it’s key to understand what they are thinking.
The truth is, nobody wakes up hoping to find a brand with a unique personality. They wake up because something is wrong. There’s a difference between where they are now and where they want to be. Their software keeps crashing. Their team feels disorganized. They are stuck, unhappy, or just bored.
This moment of difficulty – that’s when everything happens. And if you respond to that moment by talking about your brand’s values or how special you are, you’re just adding noise. What really wins? Finding the single most painful problem that is stopping them. This is called the main problem (or “hero pain point”). Your whole business should be built around removing it.
That focus helps you see what’s important and what’s not. You don’t need to solve every problem. You need to solve the one problem that matters most – the one your competitors are either not helping with or making worse.
Finding this main problem needs careful work and much research. You must study how customers act, look at what competitors offer, and notice what services or products are missing. For example, early smartphone makers competed on features. But Apple focused on how easy it was to use and a simple design – a problem that competitors mostly ignored. By fixing what truly made users unhappy, Apple created a solution – the iPhone – that felt very important. It set a high standard that others found hard to reach.
What we know about how people buy things supports this plan. According to the EBM model, every purchase starts with seeing a problem. This is the moment a customer sees a difference between their current situation and what they want. Customers trust a brand if it offers a good, useful solution at that exact moment. Being new alone does not often create loyal customers – customers want things to be clear and to feel relieved. Brands that find problems early and offer good solutions build trust and lasting relationships.
This commitment to solving core problems must continue. If you can find the one thing that hurts your customer the most – their main problem – and solve it better than anyone else, you don’t need to worry about standing out. You become the only clear choice. Because you are the one who actually makes the pain disappear.
Blink 3 – Make your competitors irrelevant
To get ahead in the market, you also need to understand your competitors better than anyone else. The brands that always do better carefully study the market. They find things their rivals don’t see, miss, or do badly in what they offer. Then, they use this knowledge cleverly. When a competitor makes a mistake, fails, or doesn’t do well, it’s a chance for you to get attention, build trust, and make your position stronger.
In this way, de-positioning works like “marketing judo.” What a competitor does well can sometimes become a weakness you can use. A company that focuses only on making new things quickly might forget about how easy their products are to use or customer help. A company too focused on growing big might not offer personal service. By seeing these missing parts and offering better solutions, your brand can become the most trusted choice.
Importantly, your goal should not be to speak badly about your competitors. Instead, you should show exactly where their products or services are not good enough for customers. Look for their old problems: old systems, being too proud, or making things too complicated. These are problems they can’t easily change because they are part of how they work. Show your brand as the exact answer to that weakness. Then, you don’t just get a sale. You make the competitor old-fashioned or unnecessary.
Good timing can make this benefit stronger. Being a second-mover helps brands learn from the mistakes of the first companies in the market. It lets them use the weaknesses of others. Apple’s way with the iPad shows this well. They studied competitor mistakes in tablet computers – for example, heavy designs, hard-to-use screens, and safety problems. Apple again brought out a solution that fixed these frustrations directly. This turned usual problems into clear benefits. Competitors’ failures became the reason for Apple’s better position.
However, the main customer problem must stay central. By putting effort into the single most important problem customers face – whether it’s ease of use, simplicity, or reliability – your brand already stands out in a meaningful way. Competitor weaknesses are then simply used as more chances to match customer needs, not as attacks or negative campaigns. Over time, this builds more trust and belief. Customers see that your brand always offers solutions that others miss – and does it honestly.
By combining good thinking, patience, and clear action, your brand can turn even the smallest competitor gap into a lasting benefit. Careful looking, planned actions, and a strong focus on solving core problems are the keys to staying in a good market position. This is true no matter how busy and competitive your market may be. By using this idea of de-positioning, you not only move forward quickly; you make your competitors less and less important.
Blink 4 – Come together and be clear
Even with good solutions and a clear advantage, clear communication is key. Effective de-positioning needs the rule of having one clear thing. You own what the authors call One Big Idea. Think of tuning a radio: one strong station is clear, but many stations at once make noise.
For example, Volvo owns the idea of “safety.” Uber owns “convenience.” Neither tries to own five other ideas because making the message less clear ruins its position. You give up the need to explain every small detail for one powerful idea – an easy way for the customer to remember. Put that one idea clearly in their mind, the one word that fixes their main problem, and you stop competitors from ever using that idea again.
It’s very important to avoid trying to do too many things (“featuritis”). You’ve probably seen it happen in meetings. You decide on one clear, powerful idea – like Volvo’s “Safety.” Then the problem starts. The sales leader wants “fuel economy” in the headline. The regional manager pushes for “affordability.” The tech leader insists on listing engine details.
Slowly, your one main idea gets cut into a meaningless list of bullet points. Everyone gets what they want, but the brand loses its edge. This problem, where different parts of a company want different things, is why so many large companies seem unsure about who they are. To make a competitor less important, you need the discipline to say “no” to good ideas that don’t serve the best idea.
When you fight against doing too many things and make your business operations work together, you get the full power of what we might call the de-positioning formula. Think of it as making things much bigger: your customer-first thinking plus your main customer problem, multiplied by your competitor’s weakness divided by your one main idea, then multiplied again by being clear and connected. The math implies something important: if your connection score is zero, your total competitive advantage is zero. A product can be great, an idea smart – but if the service is not connected, the whole plan fails.
Disney is a good example. In the 1990s, they had many separate parts – making their brand less strong with truck companies and bad films. They put things back together by selling off things that took their focus away and buying Pixar. They focused strongly on one goal: magic. They didn’t just buy a studio, but used Pixar’s technology and way of telling stories. This made every other animation studio seem old-fashioned.
As with the other ideas of de-positioning, being clear and connected are things you need to do all the time, requiring ongoing work. From big decisions by leaders to talks with customers, every interaction must show your single idea without fail. However, being disciplined here will bring big rewards later. You will then turn around and see that your competitors are no longer strong or even in business.
Blink 5 – Connect everything, connect everything, connect everything
Now we come to the final, and maybe hardest, truth about building a strong brand. You can have the best plan for customer problems, the clearest look at market gaps, and the most catchy idea – but none of it matters if your company is broken on the inside.
It’s a sad truth that in many companies, marketing is often just used to make problems look better. But here’s the thing: marketing cannot fix a broken product. A smart slogan cannot hide a company that doesn’t work well together. This is where the idea of connecting everything becomes your most important tool.
Connecting everything means making sure the promise you make in your advertising matches what you actually do. The plan has to leave the marketing department and spread through every part of the company – from where you get your products to customer service. Without that, you’re lying to your customers. And they will punish you for it.
This is why connecting everything must be led by the leaders. Normal marketing connection only changes what customers see; real marketing connection changes every part of the company. When your CEO gives the order and all managers agree on the same idea, your plan becomes how you do things, not just something nice to have. Even your customer service becomes a valuable part of your plan, making your brand’s promise stronger in every talk. Without this much acceptance, problems will always appear, making the whole system weak.
The most valuable brands show this idea by what they do, not just by how they look. Their strength isn’t built on design alone. It is built on every part of their business pointing in the same direction. When done well, connecting everything creates a powerful “lock-in” effect. This is an ecosystem where everything works together so well that changing to a competitor feels difficult, or even silly. The experience is simply too smooth and good to leave.
As a result, this unity becomes a strong source of strength. Brands that connect deeply are able to change in bad times. They stay clear when the market changes, and become stronger because every part of the company works well together. Finally, connecting everything turns the de-positioning plan from just an idea into something real. This makes sure your customers stay and your brand grows.
Final summary
In this summary of De-Positioning by Todd Irwin, you’ve learned that success in today’s very competitive market comes from being clear, focused, and working carefully.
The brands that win are not always the loudest or fanciest. They are the ones that find the biggest problem their customers face, solve it better than anyone else, and make every part of their company work towards that solution. By showing what competitors do badly, having one main idea, and making sure everything is clear and connected, a brand becomes both easy to remember and very important.
If you take nothing else away from this summary, remember this: the most important benefit in business comes from being needed, not just different. When every action, message, and product decision supports a clear goal focused on the customer, customers stay loyal, trust gets stronger, and competitors find it hard to compete. With this method, you’re not just surviving the market – you’re changing it. You’re making a place for your brand to do well and last for many years to come.
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Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/de-positioning-en