Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Al Ries and Jack Trout: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (McGraw-Hill). Ries

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.

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.

What position do you own? Positioning is thinking in reverse.

To repeat, the first rule of positioning is: To win the battle for the mind, you can’t compete head-on against a company that has a strong, established position. You can go around, under or over, but never head to head.

What position do you want to own?

Positioning is a concept that is cumulative. Something that takes advantage of advertising’s long-range nature.

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. What are you? What is your own position in life? Can you sum up your own position in a single concept? Then can you run your own career to establish and exploit that positio