Takeaways:
- Only 24% of leaders strongly agree their brand positioning is actually different from their competitors’. The other 76% are blending in.
- A brandscape is a simple grid that maps you against your rivals on the two things buyers care about most. The empty space on that grid is your opportunity.
- The gaps are already there, sitting in plain sight. Most companies have just never drawn the map that reveals them.
Picture a simple grid. Two lines, an X-axis and a Y-axis, each one measuring something your buyers actually care about when they choose a vendor. Now plot yourself and every competitor you have onto that grid based on the position each of you claims in the market. Some of you will cluster together, shouting the same promises from the same corner. And somewhere on that grid, more often than you’d expect, there’s a quadrant sitting completely empty. No competitor lives there. That empty space is the most valuable real estate in your entire market, and most B2B companies have never once looked for it.
That grid has a name. It’s a brandscape, and learning to read one is, in my experience, the most underrated growth tool available to a middle-market B2B company.
What a Brandscape Actually Is
The 12 Battles™ Framework in The B2B Marketing Revolution® is the set of twelve mindset shifts you have to win before your marketing can deliver guaranteed results. Battle 5 challenges you to own an opening in the brandscape, and the word itself is the whole idea in miniature. Brandscape combines “brand” and “landscape.” It’s a map of your brand’s territory across the market you compete in, showing where you stand relative to everyone else fighting for the same buyers.
Most leaders think they already know this terrain. The data says otherwise. In our RedRover research, only 40% of respondents strongly agreed that their marketing team has a firm grasp on their own brand positioning and that of their primary competitors, which leaves a solid 60% admitting there’s room to improve. Worse, just 24% strongly agreed that their positioning is meaningfully different from their competitors’.
Read that again. Three out of four B2B companies are, by their own admission, saying roughly the same thing as the vendor next door. That’s a market full of openings waiting for someone to claim them.
Why This Tool Stays Buried
So if the upside is this large, why does brandscape analysis stay on the shelf? Because it requires you to do something uncomfortable: look honestly at your competitors and admit where you sound exactly like them. It’s far easier to assume your differentiators are obvious and move on. The manufacturing client I’ll tell you about later was certain its edge was “expertise and customer service,” right up until we showed them that every single competitor claimed the identical two things. Comfort is the enemy here. The map only helps you if you’re willing to see yourself on it clearly.
There’s real research behind why the effort pays off. When you find and claim an unoccupied position, you’re not just refreshing a tagline. You’re handing your whole company a defensible reason to exist that no rival can echo, from the product team to the sales floor. The book puts the stakes this way:
“In your brandscape lies the promise of a unique position in a crowded marketplace and the promise of a voice that is not just heard but also remembered.”
— The B2B Marketing Revolution®
How to Map Your Brandscape in Five Steps
Here’s the method I walk clients through. It isn’t complicated, but it demands rigor at each step.
Steps 1 to 3: Draw the Map
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- Identify the key players. List your biggest competitors, and build that list from two sources: your own stakeholder interviews and your customer surveys. What your team thinks you compete against and what your customers think are often different, and the niche players claiming a sliver of the market matter as much as the household names.
- Plot the brandscape. Draw your grid. Use your customer research to pick the top two decision-making criteria that actually drive a purchase in your industry, and assign one to each axis. At the end of each axis, mark the full range of positioning, from the strongest offer in the market to the weakest. Then plot every competitor where its positioning lands. If your market has more than two make-or-break criteria, you’ll need more than one grid.
- Seek out the gaps. With everyone plotted, the empty spaces jump out. Those unclaimed quadrants are where the opportunity hides. A word of caution, though, because not every gap is worth claiming. If a quadrant is empty simply because no buyer wants what it represents, leaving it empty was the right call. The art is telling a real opening apart from a dead end.
Steps 4 and 5: Claim and Defend the Ground
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- Own your position. Once you find a gap that buyers actually value, commit to it fully. This is a declaration that you exist to fill a specific void, and half-hearted ownership convinces no one. Claiming a space tends to spark innovation across the company, pushing your product and service teams to build offerings that make the position undeniable.
- Anticipate the domino effect. The moment you reposition to fill a gap, competitors notice. Markets shift. Today’s clear opening can become tomorrow’s crowded corner. That’s why a brandscape isn’t a one-time exercise. Run it quarterly so you can adapt as rivals move and new trends surface.
To make step two concrete, picture a commercial HVAC supply house mapped on delivery speed and shipping cost. Suppose the lower-left quadrant sits empty. The company already offers same-day warehouse processing with standard ground delivery. By upgrading to free same-day processing with overnight air delivery, it claims a corner of the grid no competitor holds, and suddenly it owns a value proposition that’s genuinely its own.
Proof That the Map Points to Money
Let me show you what this looks like when the map reveals something nobody expected. Precision Craft Industrial, an $18M nationwide manufacturer based in Houston, was growing at 5% a year or less and wanted to double that rate. When we started, the team couldn’t name a single differentiator it could confidently claim, which had driven its customer acquisition cost sky-high. We ran extensive customer interviews and surveys, then built a brandscape.
Every competitor, and Precision Craft too, was shouting the same two words: expertise and customer service. But the research surfaced something none of them were talking about. Pain. By the time Precision Craft’s engineering customers came looking, they were in real pain, losing sales and missing targets because they couldn’t produce fast enough to keep up with their own growth. So we built a campaign of authentic video stories, with customers describing the sleepless nights before Precision Craft rescued them and how the company cared about them as people rather than as a sale. That message broke through precisely because no rival occupied that space. The company posted a 40% increase in year-over-year sales, and qualified lead volume over the next three years climbed 45, then 61, then 66%. Its differentiator turned out to be pain relief, and it was sitting on the brandscape the whole time, unclaimed.
One Trap to Avoid Before You Claim a Gap
A warning, because owning a position carries a risk most people don’t see coming. The space you claim has to be real, not aspirational. AutoTech Solutions, a $32M national industrial automation company, came to us sure of its differentiator: automation technology no competitor could match. The trouble was that the technology was still more promise than product, with significant issues unresolved. Its bold positioning won contracts and pulled major customers away from rivals, then lost them within months when the product couldn’t deliver what the marketing claimed. Had we known about the quality problems, we’d have advised waiting. Instead, the company took a reputational hit that will take years to undo.
The lesson is blunt. Claim a gap you can actually own today, not one you hope to grow into. A brandscape shows you where to plant your flag, but the ground under that flag has to hold.
Draw the Map Before Your Competitor Does
The openings in your market already exist. Your competitors have left them sitting there, quadrant after quadrant, because they’ve never bothered to draw the map either. The company that plots the brandscape first is the one that gets to choose its ground while the choosing is still good. As the book puts it:
“Don’t settle for belonging; find a unique space to own and craft a compelling narrative that resonates with your market.”
— The B2B Marketing Revolution®
Pull your competitors’ positioning apart, plot it honestly against your own, and find the corner of the market that’s yours for the taking. Then claim it before someone else notices it was empty all along.
Start a Revolution: OWN an opening in your brandscape.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
The above insights are part of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 Battles™ Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing Revolution® is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts, and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
