Why I map before I design

Every brand I take on arrives with an origin story and a strong opinion about who its competitors are. Both are useful. Neither is proof.

So before any creative work starts, I run what I call the market map. It is a working session, not a presentation. I put the client’s real competitors on a page, plot them against two axes that matter for that specific category, and see what’s actually true about the field they’re standing in. No slides, no mood boards, no logos in the room. Just the market, drawn honestly.

This isn’t a courtesy step I rush through to get to the fun part. It’s the backbone of everything that follows. A designer working without a market map is guessing at differentiation. A designer working from one is building toward a gap I can prove exists.

The two axes that actually tell the truth

Every category has its own tension. My map isn’t a template I drop onto every client. I build the axes from the category itself, but two tensions show up often enough that I start there and adjust.

The first: safe versus bold. Where does the messaging, the visual language, and the public posture of each competitor fall? Are they playing it careful and polished, or are they willing to take a stand and risk being disliked by someone?

The second: generic versus specific. Could you swap this brand’s name for a competitor’s and the message would still hold? Or does the brand say something only it could say, in a voice only it could use?

I plot every real competitor on those two lines, using their actual website copy, actual campaigns, actual customer-facing language, not their internal brand deck. What a company says about itself in a pitch deck and what a customer actually experiences are frequently two different brands. I map the second one.

“Central brands, such as Coca-Cola in soft drinks and McDonald’s in fast food, are those that are most representative of their type. Distinctive brands, such as Tesla in cars and Dos Equis in beer, stand out from the crowd and avoid direct competition with widely popular central brands.”

Niraj Dawar and Charan K. Bagga, "A Better Way to Map Brand Strategy," Harvard Business Review, June 2015

That distinction between central and distinctive, first argued in the Harvard Business Review nearly a decade ago, still holds. Most categories reward one strategy or the other, not both at once, and a lot of brands lose ground trying to be everything on the map simultaneously. My job in the room is to name which side of that line a client is actually built to stand on, not which side sounds more impressive in a meeting.

Plotting the field, competitor by competitor

Once the axes are set, I do the unglamorous part: research. I pull ten to fifteen real competitors, not the two or three the client always mentions, and I place each one on the grid based on evidence. Homepage language. Social voice. Pricing signals. The actual words a customer reads before they buy.

Most categories cluster hard in one corner. Financial services clusters safe and generic. Direct-to-consumer wellness clusters bold and generic, all of them chasing the same three adjectives. Local restaurant groups cluster safe and specific, each one confident in its own neighborhood but invisible outside it.

Clustering is the finding. When eight of your twelve competitors sit in the same quadrant, that quadrant is crowded and that crowding is data, not decoration. It tells me exactly where the noise is loudest and exactly where a client can’t win by joining it.

Where the white space actually lives

Here’s where the exercise earns its keep. Once the field is mapped, the open quadrants are visible, and so is the difference between open space and empty space.

Open space is a position nobody else is credibly occupying, but one the client can actually back up with proof. Empty space is a position nobody occupies because it doesn’t work, because customers don’t buy there, or because the client has no honest claim to it. Confusing the two is how brands end up bold for a season and forgotten the next.

I test the white space against three questions before I recommend it. Can the client prove it, not just claim it. Does it hold up under a direct comparison with the two or three sharpest competitors on the map, not just the weak ones. And does it match how the client actually behaves when nobody’s watching, not just how they want to be seen.

If a position fails any of those three, I don’t recommend it, no matter how open the space looks on the grid.

The gap between where they sit and where they think they sit

The most useful moment in the room is almost never the competitor plotting. It’s when I ask the client to place themselves on the same map, before I show them where I’d place them.

The gap between those two dots is the real brief. Founders consistently rate themselves bolder and more specific than their actual customer-facing language supports. That’s not a character flaw. It’s proximity. You cannot see your own brand the way a stranger scrolling past it does, and that’s precisely why this needs to happen before design starts, not after.

“Every founder thinks their brand is the bold one in the room. The market map is where we find out if the work actually backs that up, or if it’s still living in the pitch deck instead of the product.”

David Keyes

I don’t deliver that gap as a critique. I deliver it as the starting line. If a client’s authentic voice sits closer to safe-and-specific than bold-and-distinctive, that’s not a failure, it’s a more honest place to build from than the position they walked in wanting. Boldness built on a claim you can’t back up isn’t conviction. It’s exposure.

What the map decides before a single pixel gets made

By the time the market map is finished, three things are settled that would otherwise get argued about for weeks during creative review. I know which quadrant is overcrowded and off limits. I know which open space the client can genuinely defend. And I know how far the client’s authentic voice sits from where they assumed it sat, which tells me how much of the work ahead is building versus correcting.

That’s the brief the design work actually starts from. Not "make it bold." A specific coordinate on a specific map, backed by competitor evidence and tested against what the client can prove. It’s a lot less romantic than a mood board. It’s also the reason the work holds up once it’s live in a market that doesn’t care how good the pitch sounded.

I don’t dictate a position and hand it down. I map the field, show the client their own dot, and build from where they actually stand. That’s a process, not a slogan, and it’s the difference between a brand that says something and a brand that says something only it could say.

If this is the problem you’re facing, let’s talk.