To better understand what your message is up against, let’s take a closer look at the ultimate objective of all communication: the human mind.
Like the memory bank of a computer, the mind has a slot or position for each bit of information it has chosen to retain. In operation, the mind is a lot like a computer.
But there is one important difference. A computer has to accept what you put into it. The mind does not. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
The mind rejects new information that doesn’t “compute.” It accepts only that new information which matches its current state of mind. It filters out everything else.
Take any two abstract drawings. Write the name Schwartz on one and the name Picasso on the other. Then ask someone for an opinion. You see what you expect to see.
Ask two people of opposite persuasion, say, a Democrat and a Republican, to read an article on a controversial subject. Then ask each one if the article changed his or her opinion.
You’ll find that the Democrat gets out of the article facts to support one point of view. The Republican gets out of the same article facts to support the opposite point of view. Very little mind changing takes place. You see what you expect to see.
Pour a bottle of Gallo into an empty 50-year-old bottle of French Burgundy. Then carefully decant a glass in front of a friend and ask for an opinion.
You taste what you expect to taste.
Blind taste testings of champagne have often ranked inexpensive California brands above French ones. With the labels on, this is unlikely to happen.
You taste what you expect to taste.
Were it not so, there would be no role for advertising at all. Were the average consumer rational instead of emotional, there would be no advertising. At least not as we know it today.
One prime objective of all advertising is to heighten expectations. To create the illusion that the product or service will perform the miracles you expect. And presto, that’s exactly what the advertising does.
But create the opposite expectation and the product is in trouble. The introductory advertising for Gablinger’s beer created a feeling that because it was a diet product, it would taste bad.
And sure enough, the advertising worked! People tried it and were easily convinced that it did taste bad. You taste what you expect to taste.
Not only does the human mind reject information which does not match its prior knowledge or experience, it doesn’t have much prior knowledge or experience to work with.
In our overcommunicated society, the human mind is a totally inadequate container.
According to Harvard psychologist Dr. George A. Miller, the average human mind cannot deal with more than seven units at a time. Which is why seven is a popular number for lists that have to be remembered. Seven-digit phone numbers, the Seven Wonders of the World, seven-card stud, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Ask someone to name all the brands he or she remembers in a given product category. Rarely will anyone name more than seven. And that’s for a high-interest category. For low-interest products, the average consumer can usually name no more than one or two brands.
Try listing all ten of the Ten Commandments. If that’s too difficult, how about the seven danger signals of cancer? Or the four horsemen of the Apocalypse?
In one newspaper survey, 80 out of 100 Americans couldn’t name a single member of the President’s Cabinet.
If our mental storage bowl is too small to handle questions like these, how in the world are we going to keep track in our mind of all those brand names which have been multiplying like rabbits over the years?
Thirty years ago the six leading cigarette companies between them offered the American smoker 17 different brands. Today they sell more than 175. (A vending machine built to hold all these brands would have to be 30 feet long.)
“Modelitus” has struck every industry, from automobiles to beer to zoom lenses. Detroit currently sells 290 different models in a bewildering variety of styles and sizes. Caravelle, Capri, Cimarron, Camaro, Calais, Cutlass. Let’s see, is it a Chevrolet Caravelle or a Plymouth Caravelle? The public is confused.
To cope with complexity, people have learned to simplify everything.
When asked to describe an offspring’s intellectual progress, a person doesn’t usually quote vocabulary statistics, reading comprehension, mathematical ability, etc. “He’s in seventh grade” is a typical reply.
This ranking of people, objects, and brands is not only a convenient method of organizing things but also an absolute necessity to keep from being overwhelmed by the complexities of life.
To cope with the product explosion, people have learned to rank products and brands in the mind. Perhaps this can best be visualized by imagining a series of ladders in the mind. On each step is a brand name. And each different ladder represents a different product category.
Some ladders have many steps. (Seven is many.) Others have few, if any.
A competitor that wants to increase its share of the business must either dislodge the brand above (a task that is usually impossible) or somehow relate its brand to the other company’s position.
Yet too many companies embark on marketing and advertising programs as if the competitor’s position did not exist. They advertise their products in a vacuum and are disappointed when their messages fail to get through.
Moving up the ladder in the mind can be extremely difficult if the brands above have a strong foothold and no leverage or positioning strategy is applied.
An advertiser who wants to introduce a new product category must carry in a new ladder. This, too, is difficult, especially if the new category is not positioned against the old one. The mind has no room for what’s new and different unless it’s related to the old.
That’s why if you have a truly new product, it’s often better to tell the prospect what the product is not, rather than what it is.
The first automobile, for example, was called a “horseless” carriage, a name which allowed the public to position the concept against the existing mode of transportation.
Words like “off-track” betting, “lead-free” gasoline, and “sugar-free” soda are all examples of how new concepts can best be positioned against the old.
In today’s marketplace the competitor’s position is just as important as your own. Sometimes more important. An early success in the positioning era was the famous Avis campaign.
The Avis campaign will go down in marketing history as a classic example of establishing the “against” position. In the case of Avis, this was a position against the leader.
“Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.”
For 13 years in a row, Avis lost money. Then they admitted that they were No. 2 and Avis started to make money.
The first year Avis made $1.2 million. The second year, $2.6 million. The third year, $5 million. Then the company was sold to ITT.
Avis was able to make substantial gains because they recognized the position of Hertz and didn’t try to attack them head-on.
To better understand why the Avis program was so successful, let’s look into the mind of the prospect and imagine we can see a product ladder marked “rent-a-cars.”
On each rung of the product ladder is a brand name. Hertz on top. Avis on the second rung. National on the third.
Many marketing people have misread the Avis story. They assume the company was successful because it tried harder.
Not at all. Avis was successful because it related itself to Hertz. (If trying harder were the secret of success, Harold Stassen would have been President many times over.)
As an indication of how far the advertising business has come in its acceptance of comparative ads, Time magazine originally rejected the “We try harder” line as being too competitive with Hertz. Other magazines followed the Time lead.
So the account executive panicked and agreed to change the line to “We try damned hard.” (A curse word presumably being less offensive than a comparative word.)
Only after the ad was canceled did Time change its mind and agree to accept the original version. (The account executive was fired.)
Establishing the “against” position is a classic positioning maneuver. If a company isn’t the first, then it has to be the first to occupy the No. 2 position. It’s not an easy task.
But it can be done. What Avis is doing in rent-a-cars, Burger King is doing in fast foods, and Pepsi is doing in colas.
Another classic positioning strategy is to worm your way onto a ladder owned by someone else. As 7-Up did. The brilliance of this idea can only be appreciated when you comprehend the enormous share of mind enjoyed by Coke and Pepsi. Almost two out of every three soft drinks consumed in the United States are cola drinks.
By linking the product to what was already in the mind of the prospect, the “uncola” position established 7-Up as an alternative to a cola drink. (The three rungs on the cola ladder might be visualized as: One, Coke. Two, Pepsi, And three, 7-Up.)
To prove the universality of positioning concepts, McCormick Communications took beautiful-music radio station WLKW, an also-ran in the Providence (Rhode Island) market, and made it number one. Their theme: WLKW, the unrock station.
To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product.
Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind.
You won’t find an “uncola” idea inside a 7-Up can. You find it inside the cola drinker’s head.
More than anything else, successful positioning requires consistency. You must keep at it year after year.
Yet after a company has executed a brilliant positioning coup, too often it falls into what we call the F.W.M.T.S. trap: “Forgot what made them successful.”
Shortly after the company was sold to ITT, Avis decided it was no longer satisfied with being No. 2. So it ran ads saying, “Avis is going to be No. 1.”
That’s advertising your aspirations. Wrong psychologically. And wrong strategically.
Avis was not destined to be No. 1 unless it could find a weakness in Hertz to exploit.
Furthermore, the old campaign not only related No. 2 Avis to No. 1 Hertz on the product ladder in the prospect’s mind, but also capitalized on the natural sympathy people have for the underdog.
The new campaign was just conventional brag-and-boast advertising.
Be honest. In the last 20 years, Avis has run many different advertising campaigns: “The wizard of Avis.” “You don’t have to run through airports.”
But what is the single theme that leaps into your mind when someone mentions Avis?
Of course, “Avis is only No. 2, etc.” Yet Avis in the last few years has consistently ignored the only concept it really owns in the mind. Someday when National Rent-A-Car passes Avis in sales, Avis will appreciate the value of the No. 2 concept it lost.
If you want to be successful today, you can’t ignore the competitor’s position. Nor can you walk away from your own. In the immortal words of Joan Didion, “Play it as it lays.”