“They’re premium, we’re mid-range, Pampers is mass.” If this is your competitive analysis, you are navigating with a hand-drawn sketch when satellite imagery is available.
Most competitive analysis in the hygiene industry is qualitative. Brands describe their market position using adjectives — premium, value, innovative, natural — and slot competitors into loose tiers based on retail price points, brand perception, and packaging aesthetics. This approach feels intuitive. It is also structurally incapable of answering the question that actually matters: where, specifically, is the unoccupied space in the market that your next product should target?
A quantitative competitive positioning map answers that question. But building one that is genuinely useful — rather than a pretty visualization that confirms what you already believed — requires a specific methodology, and an understanding of how to use the map as a decision tool rather than a wall decoration.
Build: From Lab Data to Market Coordinates
A meaningful competitive positioning map starts in the laboratory, not in a strategy meeting.
The foundation is a full-layer engineering assessment of every product in your competitive set — your own product and the five to eight competitors that define the boundaries of your market. Each product is disassembled layer by layer, weighed component by component, and tested across multiple performance dimensions using standardized protocols.
The performance data then needs to be normalized. Raw numbers — absorption speed in seconds, rewet in grams, capacity in milliliters — are not directly comparable across dimensions because their scales and units are different. A normalization methodology converts each metric into a common score that reflects where a product falls relative to the competitive set. Without normalization, your map is distorted by whichever metric happens to have the largest numerical range.
The two axes of the map should represent the two performance dimensions that most directly drive consumer satisfaction and repurchase in your specific category. In the diaper and training pants space, our testing consistently identifies two dimensions that explain the most competitive variance: acquisition behavior (how the product handles liquid in the first seconds after insult) and sustained dryness (how the product surface feels after hours of wear under compression). Other dimensions — total capacity, structural integrity, fit — matter, but they tend to cluster products rather than separate them.
A third variable — typically total absorption capacity — can be represented as bubble size, creating a map where position communicates speed and dryness, while bubble diameter communicates storage. A fourth variable — such as twelve-hour simulated overnight performance — can be expressed through color coding or a secondary marker, adding a temporal dimension that static testing misses.
The result is a four-dimensional competitive map on a two-dimensional surface. Every product occupies a specific coordinate. Every coordinate tells a story about which engineering choices that product’s team made — and which trade-offs they accepted.
The Four Quadrants and the White Space Between Them
With normalized axes, the competitive set naturally distributes into quadrants.
Products in the upper-right quadrant — fast acquisition and high sustained dryness — have achieved the most complete engineering optimization. They typically combine advanced core architectures with well-coordinated ADL systems, and they represent the benchmark that premium brands should target.
Products in the lower-left — slow acquisition and poor sustained dryness — have structural limitations in both core and ADL design. They compete on price or brand equity rather than product performance.
The more interesting quadrants are the off-diagonal ones. A product with fast acquisition but poor sustained dryness has invested in the ADL-topsheet system but neglected the core — it handles the first insult well but degrades over time. A product with slow acquisition but good sustained dryness has a strong core but a bottleneck in the liquid transfer layers — it eventually absorbs everything, but not fast enough to prevent initial surface wetness.
The white space — the quadrant or region where no current product sits — is where the map transitions from diagnostic to strategic. White space does not automatically mean “opportunity.” It may be empty because the engineering trade-offs required to reach that position are prohibitively expensive, or because consumers in that segment do not exist in sufficient numbers. But it may also be empty because no competitor has attempted the specific combination of material choices and architectural decisions required to reach it. Distinguishing between “empty because impossible” and “empty because untried” is the critical analytical step that separates a useful map from a decorative one.
Use: From Map Coordinates to Product Architecture Decisions
A positioning map that sits in a report without driving decisions is overhead, not insight.
The map’s operational value emerges when you overlay your target product’s intended position and then work backward to the engineering specifications required to reach it. If your target position is the upper-right quadrant — fast and dry — and your current product sits in the lower-right — dry but slow — the map tells you exactly which performance dimension needs to improve, which narrows the engineering investigation to the specific layers responsible for acquisition speed rather than wasting development cycles on core optimization that will not move you toward the target.
This “map to spec” translation is where most brands stall. They can see where they want to be on the map. They cannot translate the distance between current position and target position into specific material specifications, grammage targets, and supplier requirements. The translation requires layer-by-layer interaction analysis — understanding that moving right on the speed axis might require an ADL change that also affects your position on the dryness axis, because layer interactions create coupled performance behaviors.
One framework that clarifies this translation borrows from automotive product strategy: define your most demanding product variant first — the performance flagship — and then systematically derive simpler variants from it by removing features. The flagship establishes the maximum performance envelope and validates the supply chain at its most demanding specification. Subsequent variants inherit the validated architecture at lower cost points. This approach is more capital-efficient than developing each variant independently, and it ensures architectural coherence across a product line.
Update: Why Your Map Is Already Wrong
Here is the insight that separates teams who use competitive maps from teams who are used by them: the map is a snapshot, and the market is moving.
When a new entrant’s data is added to a previously stable competitive map, the landscape can shift dramatically. In evaluations we have conducted across multiple product categories, we have observed cases where a product that appeared unremarkable on initial teardown — positioned in a lower quadrant based on flat-bench speed testing — turned out to achieve among the highest total absorption capacity scores in the competitive set, with twelve-hour sustained dryness performance approaching products positioned two quadrants higher. The explanation was architectural: the product used a composite core technology that performed poorly in the first seconds (depressing its speed score) but excelled over extended wear periods (elevating its dryness and capacity scores).
This kind of finding does not invalidate the map. It enriches it — revealing that the speed axis alone is an incomplete proxy for product quality, and that a product can be simultaneously the worst performer on one dimension and the best on another. Without the update, the team’s product strategy would have been calibrated against an incomplete picture.
The inverse is equally important. In separate evaluations, we have seen a premium brand’s diaper product map as one of the strongest performers in its category — and then watched the same brand’s training pants version deliver dramatically worse rewet performance, with surface moisture returning at several times the rate of their diaper version. Same brand, same consumer promise, catastrophically different engineering execution across product formats. The positioning map revealed what the brand name obscured.
These updates are not one-time corrections. The competitive landscape in hygiene products shifts on a six-to-twelve month cycle as brands reformulate, suppliers introduce new materials, and manufacturing processes evolve. A map that has not been refreshed with new teardown and testing data within the past two to three product cycles is not a strategic asset — it is a source of false confidence.
What a Map Cannot Tell You
A competitive positioning map is powerful precisely because it is constrained. It shows where products sit relative to each other on measurable performance dimensions. It does not show consumer willingness to pay, brand equity value, retail shelf positioning, or marketing effectiveness. A product in the upper-right performance quadrant can still fail commercially if its price point exceeds the target consumer’s threshold or its distribution strategy misses the channels where that consumer shops.
The map also does not predict competitor moves. It shows you where they are, not where they are going. A competitor currently positioned in the lower-left quadrant may be six months away from a reformulation that vaults them to the upper-right — and the map will not warn you until their new product is on shelves and in your testing lab.
These limitations are not weaknesses. They are boundaries that keep the tool honest. A positioning map that claims to predict the future or incorporate qualitative factors it cannot measure is a positioning map that will mislead you. The maps that work are the ones that do one thing rigorously: show you exactly where every product sits on the dimensions you can measure, so you can make material and architecture decisions based on evidence rather than narrative.
Your competitive positioning map is the closest thing to ground truth available in product strategy. Build it from lab data, use it to drive engineering decisions, and update it relentlessly. The brands that treat their map as a living document will consistently make better product decisions than those whose last competitive teardown was two reformulation cycles ago.
Simon Gong | Founder & CEO, Corio Hygiene Innovation Team
