Last week I shared a positioning study on the Spanish language teacher market, where I found seven creators, plotted them on a positioning map, and the pattern was immediate: most of them were saying practically the same thing, standing in the same corner of the market, making the same promise to the same vague audience.  

If you missed that post, you can read it here, because what I want to talk about today builds directly on it.

One of the tools I used to analyze those seven creators is something I learned in advertising school.

It's called a positioning axis map, and it's been sitting in the toolkit of brand strategists and advertising planners for decades. 

When I started using it with course creator clients a few years ago, I was genuinely surprised by how much it revealed — and also by how rarely anyone in the online education space was thinking this way at all.

Most course creators don't come from a marketing background.

They come from their area of expertise, they're teachers, coaches, practitioners, specialists and they built a course because they had something valuable to share. Which means a lot of the strategic thinking that advertising and brand agencies take for granted simply isn't present in most expert-led businesses.

The positioning map is one of the most useful tools I know for fixing that and it's simple enough to do on a piece of paper.

What the map actually is

You draw two axes: each axis represents a dimension that matters to buyers in your category,  something that genuinely influences how they decide who to learn from.

For the Spanish teachers, I used audience specificity on one axis (broad, teaching everyone, all the way to niche, teaching a very specific person) and learning approach on the other (academic and structured at one end, natural and conversational at the other). Those two dimensions captured most of what was meaningful about how that market was actually divided.

Then you plot your competitors on the map based on how they actually show up. Where do they land when you look at their content, their messaging, their promise?

What you'll find, almost every time, is clustering: most people in your market are sitting on top of each other in the same corner. 

They ended up there because they never made a choice at all and the default position in any market is always the safest-sounding one: broad audience, accessible approach, generic promise because it feels like it excludes the fewest people.

But that means that somewhere on the map, usually more than one place, there's empty space, one or two quadrants nobody is standing in. That's the créneau, the gap that exists because claiming it requires a more specific commitment than most people are willing to make.

Seeing it visually changes everything

Most positioning exercises ask you to write sentences: describe your ideal client, define your unique value proposition, rticulate what makes you different. These are useful eventually, but they're the wrong starting point because words are too easy to fudge. 

You can write a positioning statement that sounds completely distinct and still be describing the exact same market position as a dozen other people in your niche.

The map forces you to think spatially before you think verbally. You have to physically place yourself relative to everyone else and when you do that you can see the pattern and the empty quadrant. 

Why course creators get stuck 

Going back to the three IELTS teachers from last week’s post, each one genuinely had something different: one specialized in writing, another worked almost exclusively with medical professionals preparing to move abroad and the other one had built his entire approach around mindset and test anxiety. The differentiation was real but from the outside, you couldn't tell them apart, because none of them were naming it.

This happens because you develop your approach from the inside out. You spend months or years figuring out your methodology, defining your audience and by the time you're ready to market it, it all feels normal to you and not ike a differentiator. It’s just how you do things so you describe your course in the most universal terms possible, because you want it to feel accessible, and you end up sounding like everyone else in your space.

The map helps you see this because it asks you to compare, not describe and comparison is exactly what your audience is doing. They're not looking at your course in isolation but placing it next to everything else they've seen, building a mental ranking of who seems most relevant to their specific situation. You need to understand where you land in that comparison before you can do anything about it.

How to do this exercise yourself

Start by choosing your two axes: the right axes are the ones that reflect how your buyers actually make decisions, not the criteria you wish they used, but the ones that genuinely drive the choice. 

Some combinations that work well for course creators: self-directed learning versus hand-held and guided, paired with beginner versus advanced audience. Or methodology-heavy and structured versus intuitive and experiential, paired with how broad or specific the audience is. 

If you draw the map and everyone lands in the same spot regardless of the axes, try different ones. The right pair will make the landscape immediately legible.

Then plot ten competitors those your potential students are most likely to be comparing you against. Where do they actually land based on how they show up, not how they describe themselves?

Plot yourself using the same standard. Where do you actually land?

Look at the clustering and at the white space. Ask yourself: if you're in the crowded corner, is it because you genuinely belong there or because you haven't made a deliberate choice yet?

What happens when you find the gap

The goal isn't to squeeze yourself into a niche that doesn't fit but to find the one that does and then start claiming it clearly.

Sometimes people do this exercise and realize their differentiation is already there and proven with results. They just haven't been leading with it which means the créneau was always there and it just needed a name.

Other times, the map shows someone that they've been trying to serve everyone, and it helps them see what a more specific commitment would actually look like. 

Your gap is probably already there in what you do and the exercise is just a way of finding it so you can start communicating it with clarity and specificity, in a way that makes the right person immediately feel like you built this for them.

Try it this week and let me know what you find.

What next?

I know that for a lot of people, working through this on your own feels harder than it looks. You’re too close to your own work and you can’t always see the gap from the inside, which is why I’m opening up a small number of private calls on May 29th, 2026.

One hour, just the two of us, looking at your course, your audience, and your messaging to figure out where your créneau is. Spots are limited because I’m keeping this intentionally small. If you want one of the available spots on May 29th, you can book here.

Or learn more about positioning

• Course Positioning Strategy: Why Specific Always Outsells Broad
• I Reset My Instagram Algorithm and then Ran a Positioning Study
• Case Study: How Pat Flynn Uses Brand Language to Sell Community & Courses
• Get the Positioned to Sell bundle