Changing the direction of a large company is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. It takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.
Most marketing mistakes stem from the assumption that you’re fighting a product battle rooted in reality.
Marriage, as a human institution, depends on the concept of first being better than best. And so does business.
The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.
Success in business inflates the egos of top management.
You want to change something in a computer? Just type over or delete the existing material. You want to change something in a mind? Forget it.
When you try to be everything, you wind up being nothing.
Today brands are born, not made. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it won’t have a chance in the marketplace. And just how do you generate publicity? The best way to generate publicity is by being first. In other words, by being the first brand in a new category.
The Avis campaign will go down in marketing history as a classic example of establishing the “against” position.
Positioning is an organized system for finding a window in the mind. It 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.
The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect’s wall of indifference.
If you were forced to drink a beaker of di-hydrogen oxide, your response would probably be negative. If you asked for a glass of water, you might enjoy it. That’s right. There’s no difference on the palate. The difference, in the brain.
Traditional marketing is not focused on creating new categories. Traditional marketing is focused on creating new customers. Traditional marketing involves finding out what consumers want and then giving them what they want, better and cheaper than the competition.
In politics,” said John Lindsay, “the perception is the reality.” So, too, in advertising, in business, and in life.
In our overcommunicated society, the paradox is that nothing is more important than communication.
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.
To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product. Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind.
With a plethora of products in every category, how does a company use advertising to blast its way into the mind? The basic underlying marketing strategy has got to be “reposition the competition.” Because there are so few creneaus to fill, a company must create one by repositioning the competitors that occupy the positions in the mind. In other words, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out.
Positioning defined Positioning starts with a product. A piece of merchandise, a service, a company, an institution, or even a person. Perhaps yourself. But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.
To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the only reality that counts is what’s already in the prospect’s mind. To be creative, to create something that doesn’t already exist in the mind, is becoming more and more difficult. If not impossible. The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.