Sublime

“We’re getting out of the junk business, like employee pricing sales that boost market share but destroy residual values. It’s better to sell fewer cars at higher margins than more cars at lower margins. Selling five million vehicles at zero profit isn’t as good a proposition as selling four million vehicles at a profit.”

Although we’ve been touting that words stick in the mind, nothing lasts forever. There comes a time when a company must change words.

The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position. Nyquil, the nighttime cold medicine, gave up the daytime market. The focus of most marketing operations is just the opposite. They look for ways to broaden their markets by line extension, by size and flavor proliferation,

So we offer some rules of the road that will tell you when to use the house name and when not to. 1. Expected volume. Potential winners should not bear the house name. Small-volume products should. 2. Competition. In a vacuum, the brand should not bear the house name. In a crowded field, it should. 3. Advertising support. Big-budget brands should

For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

marketing is a battle of perception, not product. In the mind, A-1 is not the brand name, but the steak sauce itself. “Would you pass me the A-1?” asks the diner. Nobody replies: “A-1 what?” In spite of an $18 million advertising budget, the A-1 poultry launch was a dismal failure.

A company may be able to make more money by diversifying. It should think twice, however, about trying to build a position based on that concept.

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

colours, logos, characters, fonts or taglines.