Repositioning positioning: The playbook for smart brand thinking

This post is for brand strategists and positioning specialists. The folks who live in the murky middle between insight, strategy, and storytelling. If you've ever felt boxed in by boilerplate templates or found yourself repeating variations of the same brand pyramid, this series is for you.

We're going to take a more elastic, problem-solving approach to positioning, using Ulli Appelbaum's framework from The Brand Positioning Workbook as our launchpad.

What is a Brand, really?

A brand isn't a logo, a tagline, or a color palette alone. These are the most visible brand expressions, what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute folks call "distinctive brand assets." But they're not the totality of a brand.

So, what is a brand, really?

A brand is the sum of associations and perceptions in the mind of your audience. It's what they believe about you and what they expect from you—emotionally, functionally, and symbolically.

That means a brand isn't something you own. It's something you influence. And the battleground for that influence is positioning. As Ulli says in his book:

Consumers will automatically form associations with your brand whether you want them to or not. In fact, consumers will automatically put your brand into mental categories and associate specific meaning with your offering based on their personal experiences, their knowledge, their belief system, and values, and based on what they hear from others including their friends, family, peers, or the media.

Don't believe Ulli? Think Tesla pre- and post-MAGA Musk.

What is brand positioning (and brand architecture)?

Brand positioning is the strategic exercise of defining how your brand should be perceived relative to alternatives in the market. In practice, it’s about:

• Identifying what your brand should stand for: your promise to the customer (PTTC) and your unique perspective on the world.
• Clarifying the most relevant associations to build and attach to your brand.
• Aligning your promise and associations with what the customer values.
• Creating tension and contrast with the competitive set.

Brand architecture sits above this. It's the system for organizing multiple brands, sub-brands, and products. But whether you're working on a house of brands or a branded house, clear positioning is the scaffolding everything hangs from.

To learn more about brand architecture, read David Aaker's famous paper The Brand Relationship Spectrum: The Key to the Brand Architecture Challenge.

Why positioning is a creative problem to solve

Positioning often masquerades as a strategic checklist. You know the drill: category, audience, benefit, proof, reasons-to-believe (RTBs). But rigid frameworks often lead to generic answers.

Although positioning is indeed a strategic marketing exercise, along with targeting and objective setting, it is also a creative problem-solving exercise. There are several reasons for this:

• You're dealing with abstraction—associations, perceptions, emotions.
• The challenge isn't finding a position (that's easy), but the right position.
• You need to balance differentiation, relevance, credibility, and simplicity.
• It requires intuition, pattern recognition, and taste; not just analysis.

It's more like solving a brand riddle than filling in a form. Ulli's framework offers an efficient and effective starting point.

Introducing Appelbaum’s positioning territories

In The Brand Positioning Workbook, Ulli Appelbaum presents 26 "Territories." These are essentially themes that successful brand positions often fall into. Think of them as a lens for ideation.

These territories are not mutually exclusive or prescriptive; they're prompts for lateral thinking. For Ulli, these fall into three broad contextual buckets:

1. Frame of Reference & Context: the category context your brand is placed.
2. The Human Connection: the type of value you want to offer to consumers.
3. The Brand's Story: focused on your product offering's distinctiveness.

Rather than starting from a blank page, the contextual buckets and territories let you begin your positioning sprint with meaningful constraints. You're still doing the hard thinking, but you're framing the positioning challenge in richer, more dimensional ways.

The Work is already done ... Use it!

If you've ever felt like you're improvising your way through a positioning brief (or churning out frameworks that feel clever but don’t quite hold under pressure) you're not alone. Most of us were handed templates without context, or expected to "be strategic" without being shown what that actually looks like in practice.

But here's the good news: you don't need to start from zero.

Ulli Appelbaum’s Brand Positioning Workbook offers something rare in our field: a creative yet evidence-based method for building brand positions that actually stick. His 26 Positioning Territories aren’t buzzwords. They’re distilled from thousands of brand case studies and years of pattern recognition. The book gives you a structured way to think laterally, stay relevant, and differentiate with precision.

Same goes for David Aaker’s Brand Relationship Spectrum—a foundational piece on brand architecture strategy that many still haven’t read in full, despite referencing it by name. The clarity it provides on sub-brands, endorsed brands, and hybrid systems is still unmatched.

What’s missing from most brand strategy work today isn’t cleverness—it’s grounding. The best strategists borrow, build on, and remix frameworks that already work. Not because it's easier, but because it lets them spend their energy where it matters: solving the actual brand problem.

So if this series resonates, don’t just scan it. Dig deeper:

• Buy Ulli’s book: It's a positioning gym—hard work, useful reps, long-term gains. (Amazon, no affiliate BS.)
• Follow him on LinkedIn: His posts are generous, sharp, and refreshingly BS-free.
• Read Aaker's original paper. Not just the excerpts and enjoy the diagrams. Paper via Vivaldi Group website (unaffiliated with me).
• Stop reinventing the wheel. Start refining your practice.

There's no shortage of brand frameworks. But few have the clarity, versatility, and empirical weight of the ones above. You don't need to create your own system to do great work. You just need to stand on the right shoulders.