Another important aspect of marketing I’ve never discussed at length.
Positioning was a marketing concept developed by one of the true gurus of modern marketing, Al Reis, in response to the tremendous over-exposure to marketing messages we’re bombarded with every day.
That’s estimated at some 3000 ads a day. With that much noise, how are you to get someone ever to stop and get your message?
Reis and his then partner Jack Trout discussed this at length in their classic “The Positioning Era” published in 1972.
In the “old days” marketing consisted of talking about the features and benefits of your product, maybe using “image” to sell your product (the Marlboro Man). But by 1971, even the greatest guru of pre-1970’s marketing, David Ogilvy, was acknowledging that wasn’t enough.
The answer was and is positioning.
So what is positioning? Reis and Trout define it as “what the advertising does for the product in the prospect’s mind.”
If you associate your product with a certain concept, you can get that concept across in the second or few seconds you’ve got, instead of trying to explain it and losing the reader, viewer or visitor.
To people who don’t fully get the concept, positioning is often reduced to a rank. This is the classic “We’re #2, We Try Harder” campaign of Avis. But notice even there it isn’t JUST that Avis is #2, it is the concept of the underdog working hard to get on top.
An even better example is the famous “7-Up, The Un-Cola” campaign. That positioned 7-Up as “not a Cola” so anytime someone didn’t want Coke or Pepsi they’d think 7-Up. That was a tremendously successful campaign.
Good positioning can multiply the effectiveness of all of your marketing.
So what’s your positioning?