Abhilash Rao

Firms should broaden their competitive frame to invoke more advantageous comparisons. Consider these examples: In the United Kingdom, the Automobile Association positioned itself as the fourth “emergency service”—along with police, fire, and ambulance—to convey greater credibility and urgency. The International Federation of Poker is attempting to

Category points-of-parity are attributes or benefits that consumers view as essential to a legitimate and credible offering within a certain product or service category. In other words, they represent necessary—but not sufficient— conditions for brand choice.

Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationship. Relationship buffers the shock of change. To be sure, the specific product or service provided remains the fundamental basis for economic exchange, but it must not be treated as the main event. There is simply too much change in this domain for anyone

learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

Brand Narratives and Storytelling Rather than outlining specific attributes or benefits, some marketing experts describe positioning a brand as telling a narrative or story. Companies like the richness and imagination they can derive from thinking of the story behind a product or service. To help sharpen its marketing and positioning, Jim Beam,

But the messaging architecture is only the first step. For every version of the Nest story, we wrote down the most common objections and how we’d overcome them—what stats to use, what pages of the website to send people to, what partnerships to mention or testimonials to point to. We figured out which story we could put on a billboard all the way

PERCEPTUAL MAPS For choosing specific benefits as POPs and PODs to position a brand, perceptual maps may be useful. Perceptual maps are visual representations of consumer perceptions and preferences. They provide quantitative pictures of market situations and the way consumers view different products, services, and brands along various dimensions.