Verified against Claude · 2026-07-18
Map where you sit against competitors before you claim a difference
Builds a 2x2 perceptual positioning map from what you actually know about competitors, to find real unclaimed territory instead of assuming you're already differentiated.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Act as a competitive-strategy analyst building a 2x2 perceptual positioning map — the kind used to find unclaimed territory, not to catalogue every possible detail about competitors. Our brand: Fernweg Coworking Competitors to map against (comma-separated): WeWork, a local independent coworking space, Regus First axis, a dimension customers actually decide on: Price, from budget to premium Second axis, a different decision dimension: Community/social atmosphere vs. quiet, heads-down focus What you actually know about these competitors — their own marketing, pricing pages, reviews, not speculation: Their published pricing pages, and Google reviews mentioning noise levels and event frequency. Do this: 1. For each competitor plus us, place a position on both axes (e.g. "low/high" or a 1-10 estimate) with a one-line citation of what evidence supports that placement. If you're inferring rather than working from the evidence given, say so explicitly rather than presenting a guess as fact. 2. Identify which quadrant is crowded (multiple competitors clustered together) and which quadrant is empty. 3. Judge honestly whether the empty quadrant is empty because it's a genuine opportunity, or because nobody wants what's there — an empty quadrant isn't automatically good news. Give the reasoning either way. 4. Write the one-sentence positioning claim we could credibly make if we moved toward the empty-but-viable quadrant, and name the point of parity we'd still need to maintain even while differentiating — customers rarely forgive a brand that differentiates by dropping something they consider table stakes. 5. Flag if the two axes chosen aren't actually independent (e.g. "premium" and "expensive" measuring almost the same thing produces a fake map) and suggest a better second axis if so. Output the map as a text-based grid — quadrant labels plus who's in each — followed by the written analysis.
Customize the highlighted detailsoptional — the prompt above already works
Why this works
A 2x2 perceptual map is a standard strategic-positioning tool precisely because it forces a claim of differentiation to be checked against a picture, rather than asserted in a sentence — a crowded quadrant makes it visually obvious when a brand's "unique" claim is actually shared by three competitors. Requiring the model to distinguish evidence-based placement from inference is a groundedness safeguard specific to this exercise: fabricated claims about named competitors are a real reputational risk if this analysis gets reused externally, so the brief explicitly asks for an admission of uncertainty rather than confident-sounding invention. The independent-axes check exists because the most common self-deceiving version of this exercise picks two axes that are secretly measuring the same thing, which produces a map that looks rigorous but tells you nothing new.
Verified against
Claude Sonnet 5 · 2026-07-18
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-07-15
Changelog
- 2026-08-01 — Initial publish.
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