If everyone can build it, the position is the only thing that can't be copied.
Business theorists Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle described it as a surplus society: similar people, with similar educations, working in similar jobs, producing similar things, of similar quality, at similar prices. Almost everything, done adequately, by almost everyone.
That line was written when it was still a warning. It now reads like a description of your category, whatever it is.
THE USP USED TO LIVE IN THE OBJECT.
For most of the last century, a unique selling proposition was a physical fact. A better ingredient. A patented mechanism. A factory nobody else had. You could point at the product and say, this is why. The advantage sat in the thing itself, and a competitor needed years, capital and often a licence to catch up.
That world is mostly gone. Manufacturing is a service you can buy by the container. Formulations get reverse-engineered in a lab within a quarter. Software features ship in a sprint, and a rival copies the good ones by the next release. Supply chains that once took a decade to build now get assembled in a year, by anyone with the money to pay for them. The physical, ownable, defensible product advantage still exists here and there, but it's rare, and it's getting rarer, and it's never permanent even when you find it.
SO WHERE DOES THE ADVANTAGE LIVE NOW?
Two places, and they're the only two places left that can't be bought off a shelf.
The first is service: not the product, but everything around getting it, using it, and being looked after once you have it. Service is slow to copy because it's not a spec, it's a thousand small decisions made consistently, by people, under pressure, over years. You can copy a feature from a screenshot. You can't copy how a company behaves when something goes wrong.
The second is story, and this is the one most businesses still underestimate. Not marketing, not a tagline, the actual, coherent, believed reason a category exists and why this business is the true version of it. A product can be matched. A story has to be built, and building the wrong one, or building nothing at all, cannot be fixed by better manufacturing.
THIS IS THE PART MOST COMPANIES GET BACKWARDS.
Faced with a surplus of similar things, the instinct is to try harder at being similar, better specs, another feature, a lower price. That's optimising inside a category everyone already occupies. It buys you a few months of advantage, until the surplus catches up again, because it always does.
The businesses that actually get free of the surplus do the opposite. They stop trying to be the best version of what everyone already makes, and they claim a specific, ownable answer to a question competitors haven't bothered to ask: who is this actually for, who is it deliberately not for, and what does it mean to choose it. That answer can't be reverse-engineered from a bill of materials, because it was never in the materials to begin with.
A POSITION IS THE LAST UNFAIR ADVANTAGE.
Not because a good position is hard to think of. Because a good position is hard to become. It has to be lived in every service interaction and told consistently enough to become the story a customer repeats without being asked to. A competitor can order the same components you did by next Tuesday. They can't order your position, because you're already standing in it.
We impose meaning. Not message. In a surplus economy, meaning is the only thing left that doesn't ship from a factory.