There is a half of this discipline that almost nobody does.
Everyone positions themselves. Very few position the people they are up against. And of the two, the second is more durable, because a position you build only around yourself can be entered by anyone who fancies it, while a position that defines the rest of the category leaves your competitors standing in ground you chose for them.
The principle is simple to state. Every strong position implies a frame. The frame decides what counts as good. If you own the frame, competitors have to argue inside terms you set, and arguing inside someone else's terms is how you lose slowly while sounding reasonable.
Think about what happens when a brand establishes that the relevant question is speed. Every rival now has to be fast, or explain why fast does not matter, and explaining why the thing everyone wants does not matter is the worst sales position available. They have not been attacked. They have been assigned a role.
Most positioning work skips this because it is taught as an internal exercise: who are we, what do we believe, what makes us different. Useful questions. But they produce a description of you, floating free of anyone else, and difference described in isolation is just a list of attributes. Difference only becomes valuable when it is difference from, and that requires you to say something about them.
Not attack them. This is not comparative advertising and it does not need a competitor's name in it. It needs a definition of what good looks like that you meet and they structurally cannot.
Structurally is the word doing the work. If you frame the category around something a competitor could adopt next quarter, you have given them a to-do list. The frame has to rest on something they would have to break themselves to match: their business model, their scale, their ownership, their legacy revenue, their cost base. A network agency cannot credibly own senior-people-only, because their economics require leverage. A market leader cannot credibly own the challenger's frame without conceding the throne. Those are structural. Those hold.
So the question to ask is not what makes us different. It is: what would my biggest competitor have to give up in order to say what I am about to say. If the answer is nothing, keep going. If the answer is a third of their revenue, you have found it.
There is a second-order effect worth naming. When you frame the category well, you stop competing on the shortlist and start deciding who gets onto it. The most valuable outcome of positioning is not winning the pitch. It is the pitch happening without three of your rivals in the room, because the brief was written in your language.
That gap, once it opens, is very hard to cross.