We study positivity properties of the quasilinear elliptic equation \(\begin{aligned} -\textrm{div}\mathcal {A}(x,\nabla u)+V|u|^{p-2}u=0\quad (1<p<\infty )\qquad \text{ in } \Omega , \end{aligned}\) where the function \(\mathcal {A}(x,\xi )\) is induced by a family of norms on \(\mathbb {R}^{n}\) ( \(n\ge 2\) ) parameterized by points in the domain \(\Omega \subseteq \mathbb {R}^{n}\) , and V belongs to a certain local Morrey space. We first establish some two-sided estimates for the Bregman distances of \(|\xi |^{p}_{s,a}\) ( \(1<s<\infty \) ), where \(a=(a_{1},a_{2},\ldots ,a_{n})\) and \(a_{1},a_{2},\ldots ,a_{n}\) are certain functions with positive local lower and upper bounds in \(\Omega \) . These estimates lead to a Maz’ya-type characterization for Hardy-weights of the corresponding functionals. Then we prove three types of sufficient conditions for the attainment of the Hardy constant in a certain space \(\widetilde{W}^{1,p}_{0}(\Omega )\) .