How did a hard-sell concept like positioning become so popular in a business noted for its creativity?
In truth, the past decade might well be characterized as a “return to reality.” White knights and black eye patches gave way to such positioning concepts as “Lite Beer from Miller. Everything you always wanted in a beer. And less.”
Poetic? Yes. Artful? Yes. But also a straightforward, clearly defined explanation of the basic positioning premise.
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 to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.
Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.
The question most frequently asked by positioning skeptics is, “Why?” Why do we need a new approach to advertising and marketing?
The answer is that we have become an overcommunicated society. The per-capita consumption of advertising in America today is $376.62 a year. (That compares with $16.87 in the rest of the world.)
If you spend $1 million a year on advertising, you are bombarding the average consumer with less than a half cent of advertising, spread out over 365 days—a consumer already exposed to $376.61½ worth of other advertising.
In our overcommunicated society, to talk about the “impact” of your advertising is to seriously overstate the potential effectiveness of your message. Advertising is not a sledgehammer. It’s more like a light fog, a very light fog that envelops your prospects.
In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, “positioning.”
The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.
Millions of dollars have been wasted trying to change minds with advertising. Once a mind is made up, it’s almost impossible to change it. Certainly not with a weak force like advertising. “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up.” That’s a way of life for most people.
The average person will sit still when being told something which he or she knows nothing about. (Which is why “news” is an effective advertising approach.) But the average person cannot tolerate being told he or she is wrong. Mind-changing is the road to advertising disaster.
The only defense a person has in our overcommunicated society is an oversimplified mind.
Not unless they repeal the law of nature that gives us only 24 hours in a day will they find a way to stuff more into the mind.
The average mind is already a dripping sponge that can only soak up more information at the expense of what’s already there. Yet we continue to pour more information into that supersaturated sponge and are disappointed when our messages fail to get through.
Advertising, of course, is only the tip of the communication iceberg. We communicate with each other in a wide variety of bewildering ways. And in a geometrically increasing volume.
The medium may not be the message, but it does seriously affect the message. Instead of a transmission system, the medium acts like a filter. Only a tiny fraction of the original material ends up in the mind of the receiver.
Furthermore, what we receive is influenced by the nature of our overcommunicated society. “Glittering generalities” have become a way of life in our overcommunicated society. We oversimplify because that’s the only way to cope.
Technically, we are capable of increasing the volume of communication at least tenfold. We’re experimenting with direct television broadcasting from satellites. Every home would have 100 channels or so to choose from.
North American Philips has just introduced a 3½-inch compact disc that holds 600 megabytes of data, more than enough to store the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Terrific. But who is working on a compact disc for the mind? Who is trying to help the prospect cope with complexity that so overwhelms the mind that the average reaction to the wealth of information today is to tighten the intake valve? To accept less and less of what is so freely available? Communication itself is the communication problem.
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.
People who depend on communication for their livelihood know the necessity of oversimplification.
Let’s say you are meeting with a politician whom you are trying to get elected. In the first 5 minutes, you’ll learn more about your political product than the average voter is going to learn about that person in the next 5 years.
Since so little material about your candidate is ever going to get into the mind of the voter, your job is really not a “communication” project in the ordinary meaning of the word.
It’s a selection project. You have to select the material that has the best chance of getting through.
The enemy that is keeping your messages from hitting pay dirt is the volume of communication. Only when you appreciate the nature of the problem can you understand the solution.
When you want to communicate the advantages of a political candidate or a product or even yourself, you must turn things inside out.
You look for the solution to your problem not inside the product, not even inside your own mind.
You look for the solution to your problem inside the prospect’s mind.
In other words, since so little of your message is going to get through anyway, you ignore the sending side and concentrate on the receiving end. You concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect. Not the reality of the product.
“In politics,” said John Lindsay, “the perception is the reality.” So, too, in advertising, in business, and in life.
But what about truth? What about the facts of the situation?
What is truth? What is objective reality? Every human being seems to believe intuitively that he or she alone holds the key to universal truth. When we talk about truth, what truth are we talking about? The view from the inside or the view from the outside?
It does make a difference. In the words of another era, “The customer is always right.” And by extension, the seller or communicator is always wrong.
It may be cynical to accept the premise that the sender is wrong and the receiver is right. But you really have no other choice. Not if you want to get your message accepted by another human mind.
Besides, who’s to say that the view from the inside looking out is any more accurate than the view from the outside looking in?
By turning the process around, by focusing on the prospect rather than the product, you simplify the selection process. You also learn principles and concepts that can greatly increase your communication effectiveness.