Sublime

The best approach to take in our overcommunicated society is the oversimplified message. In communication, as in architecture, less is more. You have to sharpen your message to cut into the mind. You have to jettison the ambiguities, simplify the message, and then simplify it some more if you want to make a long-lasting impression.

Competitive alternatives. What customers would do if your solution didn’t exist. Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives lack. Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable for customers. Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to really care a

A company can become incredibly successful if it can find a way to own a word in the mind of the prospect. Not a complicated word. Not an invented one. The simple words are best, words taken right out of the dictionary.

The issue should less be one of what volume you manage than what results you accomplish with that volume—profitability, client satisfaction, or skill building.

Their insight was framed in the language of business strategy: identify your strengths and weaknesses, assess the opportunities and risks (your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses), and build on your strengths. But the power of that strategy derived from their discovery of a different way of viewing competitive advantage—a shift from thinking about

The lesson here is that a successful positioning program requires a major long-term commitment by the people in charge. Whether it’s the head of a corporation, a church, an airline, or a country.

Cost, reliability, speed, and other such characteristics would come to the fore, and practice development tactics would involve highly targeted and…

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For a repositioning strategy to work, you must say something about your competitor’s product that causes the prospect to change his or her mind, not about your product, but about the competitor’s product.

Result: early success and long-term failure as illustrated by the failure of Donald Trump.