What works for a leader doesn’t necessarily work for a follower. Leaders can often cover a competitive move and retain their leadership.
But followers are not in the same position to benefit from a covering strategy. When a follower copies a leader, it’s not covering at all. It’s better described as a me-too response. (Usually phrased more diplomatically as “keeping in tune with the times.”)
Most products fail to achieve reasonable sales goals because the accent is on “better” rather than “speed.” That is, the No. 2 company thinks the road to success is to introduce a me-too product, only better.
It’s not enough to be better than the competitor. You must introduce your product before someone else has a chance to establish leadership. With a more massive advertising and promotion launch. And a better name. (More on this point later.)
Yet the opposite normally occurs. The me-too company wastes valuable time on improving the product. Then the launch is made with a smaller advertising budget than the leader’s. And then the new product is given the house name, because that’s the easy way to ensure a quick share of market. All deadly traps in our overcommunicated society.
How do you find an open position in the prospect’s mind?
The French have a marketing expression that sums up this strategy rather neatly.
Cherchez le creneau. “Look for the hole.”
Cherchez le creneau and then fill it.
That advice goes against the “bigger and better” philosophy ingrained into the American spirit.
Another typically American attitude makes positioning thinking difficult. Ever since childhood, we have been taught to think in a certain way.
“The power of positive thinking,” Norman Vincent Peale called it. An attitude which may sell a lot of books but which can destroy a person’s ability to find a creneau.
To find a creneau, you must have the ability to think in reverse, to go against the grain. If everyone else is going east, see if you can find your creneau by going west. A strategy that worked for Christopher Columbus can also work for you.
Let’s explore some strategies for finding creneaus.
For years, Detroit automakers were on a longer, lower kick. Each model year, cars became more streamlined, better looking.
Enter the Volkswagen Beetle. Short, fat, and ugly.
The conventional way to promote the Beetle would have been to minimize the weaknesses and maximize the strengths.
“Let’s get a fashion photographer who can make the car look better than it is. Then we’ll play up the reliability angle,” is your ordinary strategy.
But the creneau was size. The most effective ad Volkswagen ever ran was the one which stated the position clearly and unequivocally.
With two simple words, this headline did two things at once. It stated the Volkswagen position, and it challenged the prospect’s assumption that bigger is necessarily better.
The effectiveness of this approach, of course, depends on the existence of an open creneau in the prospect’s mind. Not that there weren’t other small cars on the market at the time the Beetle was introduced. There were, but no one else had preempted the small-car position.
Integrated circuits and other electronic devices make the “small-size” creneau technically feasible in many product categories. Only time will tell which companies will be able to capitalize on electronics to build valuable positions based on miniaturization.
The opposite presents opportunities too. There are opportunities to build positions in projection television sets and other products based on large size.
The classic example is Michelob. The people at Anheuser-Busch found an untapped market for a premium-priced domestic beer. And they moved into the mind with the Michelob name.
High-price creneaus seem to be opening up in many product categories. As our throwaway society sees the urgent need for conversation, there’s a new appreciation of a quality product designed to last.
Which is one reason behind the success of $40,000 automobiles like the BMW 635-CS and $50,000 cars like the Mercedes-Benz 500-SEL.
And S. T. Dupont (nice name) lighters at, as the ads say, “$1500 and down.”
Price is an advantage, especially if you’re the first in the category to establish the high-price creneau.
Some brands base almost their entire product message on the high-price concept.
“There is only one Joy, the costliest perfume in the world.”
“Why you should invest in a Piaget, the world’s most expensive watch.”
High price is effective not only for luxury items like cars, perfume, and watches, but also mundane products like Whitney’s Yogurt and Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn.
Mobil 1 synthetic engine lubricant at $3.95 a quart is another example. Even traditional low-priced products like flour, sugar, and salt represent positioning opportunities.
Too often, however, greed gets confused with positioning thinking. Charging high prices is not the way to get rich. Being the first to (1) establish the high-price position (2) with a valid product story (3) in a category where consumers are receptive to a high-priced brand is the secret of success. Otherwise, your high price just drives prospective customers away.
Furthermore, the place to establish the high price is in the ads, not in the store. The price (high or low) is as much a feature of the product as anything else.
If you do your positioning job right, there should be no price surprises in the store. Your ads don’t have to quote exact prices, although sometimes that’s a good thing to do. What they should do, however, is to clearly position your brand in a particular price category.
Instead of high price, the opposite direction can also be a profitable tack to take.
In evaluating price as a possible creneau, keep in mind that the low-price creneau is often a good choice for new products like facsimile equipment and videotape players. Products customers believe they are taking a chance on. (If the thing doesn’t work right, I’m not out that much money.)
The high-price creneau is often a good choice for old, established products like automobiles, watches, and television sets. Especially those products for which customers are not happy with existing repair services.
The recent introduction of generic (“no name”) food brands is an attempt to exploit the low-price creneau in the supermarket. (Although retailer emphasis on sales and low prices over the years have pretty much wiped out the opportunities in that direction.)
When you combine all three price strategies (high, standard, and low), you normally have a strong marketing approach. As Anheuser-Busch has done with Michelob, Budweiser, and Busch (their low-priced beer).
The weakest brand, of course, is Busch because of the poor name and lack of a strong positioning concept. Why would the owner of the place put his name only on his lowest-priced product?
A better name for a low-priced beer is Old Milwaukee, which leads its category in sales.
Sex is one. Marlboro was the first national brand to establish a masculine position in cigarettes, one reason why Phillip Morris’s Marlboro brand has climbed steadily in sales. From fifth place in sales to first place in a 10-year period.
Timing is critical. In 1973 Lorillard tried to introduce its own masculine brand called Luke. The name was terrific, the packaging was great, the advertising was brilliant. “From Kankakee to Kokomo along comes Luke movin’ free and slow.”
The only thing wrong was the timing. About 20 years too late. Luke really was movin’ slow, so Lorillard killed him.
In positioning a product, there’s no substitute for getting there first.
What masculinity did for Marlboro, femininity did for Virginia Slims, a brand that carved out a substantial share with the opposite approach. But Eve, a me-too brand that also tried the feminine approach, was a failure. Eve was too late.
When you use sex to segment a product category and establish a position, the obvious approach isn’t always the best.
Take perfume, for example. You’d think that the more delicate and feminine the brand, the more successful it would be. So what’s the largest-selling brand of perfume in the world?
No, it’s not Arpege or Chanel No. 5. It’s Revlon’s Charlie. The first brand to try a masculine name complete with pantsuit ads.
The knockoff brand, “Just Call Me Maxi,” was not only poorly done but reportedly cost the president of Max Factor his job.
The Charlie success story illustrates the paradox of established product categories like perfume. The bulk of the business is in one direction (feminine brand names), but the opportunity lies in the opposite (a masculine brand name).
Age is another positioning strategy to use. Geritol tonic is a good example of a successful product aimed at older folks.
Aim toothpaste is a good example of a product aimed at children. Aim has carved out 10 percent of the toothpaste market. A tremendous accomplishment in a market dominated by two powerful brands, Crest and Colgate.
Time of day is also a potential positioning possibility. Nyquil, the first night-time cold remedy, is one example.
Distribution is another possibility. L’eggs was the first hosiery brand to be distributed in supermarkets and mass merchandise outlets. L’eggs now is the leading brand, with sales in the hundreds of millions.
Another possibility is the heavy-user position. “The one beer to have when you’re having more than one” positioned Schaefer as the brand for the heavy beer drinker.
One common mistake in looking for creneaus is filling a hole in the factory rather than one in the mind.
Ford’s Edsel is the classic example. In the laughter that followed the demise of poor Edsel, most people missed the point.
In essence, the Ford people got switched around. The Edsel was a beautiful case of internal positioning to fill a hole between Ford and Mercury on the one hand and Lincoln on the other hand.
Good strategy inside the factory. Bad strategy outside where there was simply no position for this car in a category already cluttered with heavily chromed, medium-priced cars.
If the Edsel had been tagged a “high-performance” car and presented in a sleek two-door, bucket-seat form and given a name to match, no one would have laughed. It could have occupied a position that no one else owned, and the ending of the story might have been different.
Another “fill-the-factory” mistake was the National Observer, the first national weekly newspaper.
Dow Jones, the Observer’s proud parent, also publishes The Wall Street Journal, but only 5 days a week. Voilà, you can hear somebody say. Let’s fill the factory with a weekly newspaper. That way, we get free use of those expensive Journal presses.
But where was the hole in the prospect’s mind? He or she could already subscribe to Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and other news magazines.
Aah, you say. But the National Observer is a weekly newspaper, not a magazine. But that’s playing semantic games. Prospects didn’t differentiate between the two.
Even a great technical achievement of a research laboratory will fail if there is no creneau in the mind.
In 1971 Brown-Forman Distillers launched Frost 8/80, the first “dry, white whisky.”
Frost 8/80 should have been a big success. There was a big hole there. There was no other dry, white whisky. As Brown-Forman president William F. Lucas said, “It was greeted with great applause by our people and a gnashing of teeth by our competitors.”
Yet less than 2 years later, Frost 8/80 was dead. A multimillion-dollar failure. Volume had totaled just 100,000 cases, one-third of the company’s projections.
What went wrong? Look at the positioning claim from the prospect’s point of view.
The first white whisky? Not true. There are at least four others. Their names are gin, vodka, rum, and tequila.
As a matter of fact, Frost 8/80 ads encouraged the prospect to look at the new whisky as a substitute for other distilled spirits. According to the ads, Frost 8/80 could be used like vodka or gin in martinis, like scotch or bourbon in manhattans and whisky sours.
Don’t try to trick the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It’s a seduction.
The prospect won’t sit still for the finer points of verbal logic. As the politician said, “If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, I say it’s a duck.”
Some marketing people reject the “cherchez le creneau” concept. They don’t want to be tied down to a specific position because they believe it limits their sales. Or their opportunities.
They want to be all things to all people.
Years ago, when there were a lot fewer brands and a lot less advertising, it made sense to try to appeal to everybody.
In politics it used to be suicide for a politician to take a strong position on anything. Don’t step on anybody’s toes.
But today in the product arena and in the political arena, you have to have a position. There are too many competitors out there. You can’t win by not making enemies, by being everything to everybody.
To win in today’s competitive environment, you have to go out and make friends, carve out a specific niche in the market. Even if you lose a few doing so.
Today the everybody trap may keep you afloat if you’re already in office or already own a substantial share of market. But it’s deadly if you want to build a position from nowhere.