Positioning: The Battle Of Your Mind

BOOK REVIEW

OF

POSITIONING: The Battle of your Mind

BY: Jack Trout and Al Ries

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind is a book that shows one how to use powerful and innovative techniques to capture the biggest market share and become a household name, build one's strategy around the competitor's weaknesses, use the present position to its best advantage, choose the best name for the product, determine when and why less is more, and analyze trends that can affect one's positioning. The book provides ample illustrative cases as well as for positioning correctly.

Book Review

The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already in the mind and to retie the connections that already exist. The question most frequently asked by positioning skeptics is, "Why?" Why do we need a new approach to advertising and marketing? The answer is that we have become an over communicated society. In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word: "Positioning." The best approach to take in our over communicated society is the oversimplified message. Since so little of your message is going to get through anyway, you ignore the sending side and concentrate on the receiving end. You concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect, not the reality of the product. By focusing on the prospect rather than the product, you simplify the selection process. You also learn principles and concepts that can greatly increase your communication effectiveness.

The Assault on the Mind

One reason our messages keep getting lost is the number of media we have invented to serve our communication needs. Another reason is, the number of products we have invented to take care of our physical and mental needs. And how does the average person cope with the product and media explosions? Not very well. Studies on the sensitivity of the human brain have established the existence of a phenomenon called "sensory overload." Beyond a certain point, the brain goes blank and refuses to receive sensation. Ironically, as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up. Not just in volume, but in the number of users.

Getting into the Mind

Positioning is an organized system that is based on the concept that communication can only take place at the right time and under the right circumstances. The easy way to get into a person's mind is to be first. You build brand loyalty in a supermarket the same way you build mate loyalty in a marriage. You get there first and then be careful not to give them a reason. The hard way to get into a person's mind is second. The advertising industry is learning the lesson, the hard way. With the magic of money and enough bright people, some companies feel that any marketing program should succeed. But, that isn't right. To understand how we got to where we are today, it might be helpful to take a quick look at recent communication history. In the product era, the advertising people focused their attention on product features and customer benefits. They looked for a USP. In the image era, successful companies found that reputation or image was more important in selling a product than any specific product feature. But just as the "me-too" products killed the product era, the "me-too" companies killed the image era. As every company tried to establish a reputation for itself, the noise level became so high that relatively few companies succeeded. In the positioning era, today, it has become obvious that advertising is entering a new era--an era where creativity is no longer the key to succeed in our over communicated society. A company must create a position in the prospect's mind, a position that takes into account not only a company's own strengths and weaknesses, but also those of its competitors.

Those Little Ladders in your Head

The mind rejects new information that doesn't "compute". It accepts only that new information which matches its current state--it filters out everything else. One prime objective of advertising is to heighten expectations--to create the service will perform the miracles you expect. But create the product is in trouble. To cope with the product explosion, people have learned to rank products and brands in the mind. Perhaps, this can best be visualized by imagining a series of ladders in the mind. On each step is a brand name. And each different ladder represents a different product category. Some ladders have many steps (as many as seven); others have few, if any. A competitor that wants to increase its share of the business must either dislodge the superior brand (a task that is usually impossible) or somehow relate its brand to the other company's position. Yet, too many companies embark on marketing and advertising programs as if the competitor's position did not exist. They advertise their products in a vacuum and are disappointed when their messages fail to get through. In today's market place, the competitor's position is just as important as your own. Establishing the "against" position is a classic positioning maneuver. If a company isn't first, then it has to be the first to occupy the No.2 position. It's not an easy task. However, it can be done. What Avis is doing in rent-a-cars, Burger King is doing in fast foods and Pepsi is doing in colas are a few examples. Another classic positioning strategy is to worm your way onto a ladder owned by someone else. To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says that you should find your concept inside yourself or inside the product. Not true. What you must do is to look inside the prospect's mind.

You can't get there from here

Today, a company can have a great product, a great sales force, a great advertising campaign and still miserably fail if it happens to be in a position in which "you can't get there from here".

An also-ran can easily be tempted to think that the answer to the problem is trying harder. A company stuck with a losing position is not going to benefit much from hard work. The problem is not what, but when. The extra effort, if it is going to be of much help, should be applied early to establish the precious posture of product leadership. Invariably, every industry