Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

The pure covering move is often difficult to sell internally. Management often sees the new product or service as a competitor rather than as an opportunity. Sometimes a name change will help bridge the gap from one era to the next. By broadening the name, you can allow the company to make the mental transition.

The time for extra effort is clearly when the situation is in doubt. When neither side has a clearcut superiority. Winning the battle for sales leadership in a single year will often clinch the victory for decades to come. It takes 110 percent of rated power for a jet to get its wheels off the ground. Yet when it reaches 30,000 feet, the pilot can

The effectiveness of this approach, of course, depends on the existence of an open creneau in the prospect’s mind. Not that there weren’t other small cars on the market at the time the Beetle was introduced. There were, but no one else had preempted the small-car position.

Well, the good old advertising days are gone forever and so are the words. Today you find comparatives, not superlatives.

Leaders can do anything they want to. Short-term, leaders are almost invulnerable. Momentum alone carries them along.

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 t

Too often, however, greed gets confused with positioning thinking. Charging high prices is not the way to get rich. Being the first to (1) establish the high-price position (2) with a valid product story (3) in a category where consumers are receptive to a high-priced brand is the secret of success. Otherwise, your high price just drives prospectiv

Most leaders should cover competitive moves by introducing another brand. This is the classic “multibrand” strategy of Procter & Gamble. It may be a misnomer to call it a multibrand strategy. Rather it’s a single-position strategy. Each brand is uniquely positioned to occupy a certain location in the mind of the prospect. When times change, whe

Were it not so, there would be no role for advertising at all. Were the average consumer rational instead of emotional, there would be no advertising. At least not as we know it today.