There comes a time when you can’t find a creneau. With hundreds of variations in each product category on the market, the chances of finding an open hole today are very slim.
For example, take your average supermarket, with 12,000 different products or brands on display. That means a young person has to sort out and catalog 12,000 different names in his or her head.
When you consider that the average college graduate has a speaking vocabulary of only 8000 words, you can see the problem.
The kid spends 4 years in a university and ends up 4000 words down.
With a plethora of products in every category, how does a company use advertising to blast its way into the mind? The basic underlying marketing strategy has got to be “reposition the competition.”
Because there are so few creneaus to fill, a company must create one by repositioning the competitors that occupy the positions in the mind.
In other words, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out.
“The world is round,” said Christopher Columbus. “No, it’s not,” said the public, “it’s flat.”
To convince the public otherwise, fifteenth century scientists first had to prove that the world wasn’t flat. One of their more convincing arguments was the fact that sailors at sea were first able to observe the tops of the masts of an approaching ship, then the sails, then the hull. If the world were flat, they would see the whole ship at once.
All the mathematical arguments in the world weren’t as effective as a simple observation the public could verify themselves.
Once an old idea is overturned, selling the new idea is often ludicrously simple. As a matter of fact, people will often actively search for a new idea to fill the void.
Never be afraid to conflict either. The crux of a repositioning program is undercutting an existing concept, product, or person.
Conflict, even personal conflict, can build a reputation overnight. Where would Sam Ervin have been without Richard Nixon?
For that matter, where would Richard Nixon have been without Alger Hiss?
And Ralph Nader got famous not by saying anything about Ralph Nader but by going out and attacking the world’s largest corporation single-handedly.
People like to watch the bubble burst.
Tylenol went out and burst the aspirin bubble.
“For the millions who should not take aspirin,” said Tylenol’s ads. “If your stomach is easily upset … or you have an ulcer … or you suffer from asthma, allergies, or iron-deficiency anemia, it would make good sense to check with your doctor before you take aspirin.
“Aspirin can irritate the stomach lining,” continued the Tylenol ad, “trigger asthmatic or allergic reactions, cause small amounts of hidden gastrointestinal bleeding.
“Fortunately, there is Tylenol …”
Sixty words of copy before any mention of the advertiser’s product.
Sales of Tylenol acetaminophen took off. Today Tylenol is the No. 1 brand of analgesic. Ahead of Anacin. Ahead of Bayer. Ahead of Bufferin. Ahead of Excedrin. A simple but effective repositioning strategy did the job.
Against an institution like aspirin. Amazing.
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.
“Royal Doulton. The china of Stoke-on-Trent, England vs. Lenox. The china of Pomona, New Jersey.”
Note how Royal Doulton is repositioning Lenox china, a product that many buyers thought was an imported one. (Lenox. Sounds English, doesn’t it?)
Royal Doulton credits a 6 percent gain in market share to this one advertisement.
The late Howard Gossage used to say that the objective of your advertising should not be to communicate with your consumers and prospects at all, but to terrorize your competition’s copywriters, and there’s some truth in that.
“Most American vodkas seem Russian,” said the ads. And the captions said: “Samovar: Made in Schenley, Pennsylvania. Smirnoff: Made in Hartford, Connecticut. Wolfschmidt: Made in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.
“Stolichnaya is different. It is Russian,” continued the ad. And the bottle is labeled, “Made in Leningrad, Russia.”
Stolichnaya sales began to soar as a result. Needless to say.
But why the need to disparage the competition? Couldn’t PepsiCo, the importers of the Stolichnaya brand, have simply advertised it as the “Russian vodka?”
They could have, of course. But that presumes a degree of product interest on the part of the vodka buyer that just doesn’t exist.
How many times have you picked up a bottle of liquor and read the label to find out where it was made? Furthermore, the names themselves (Samovar, Smirnoff, Wolfschmidt, Popov, Nikolai) imply a Russian origin. It’s this latter factor alone that was responsible for much of Stolichnaya’s astounding success.
People like to see the high and mighty exposed. Note how other vodka ads play into Stolichnaya’s hands.
It was the Golden Age of Russia. Yet in this time when legends lived, the Czar stood like a giant among men. He could bend an iron bar on his bare knee. Crush a silver ruble with his fist. And had a thirst for life like no other man alive. And his drink was Genuine Vodka. Wolfschmidt Vodka.
Then the reader turns the page to find the Stolichnaya ad, where he sees that Wolfschmidt is made in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.
Along comes Afghanistan and suddenly Stolichnaya is in trouble. But only temporarily. After a few months, the storm blew over and Stolichnaya came back bigger than ever.
What happened to Pringle’s potato chips? Introduced with a $15 million fanfare from Procter & Gamble, the “new-fangled” potato chips rapidly gobbled up 18 percent of the market.
Then the old-fangled brands like Borden’s Wise struck back with a classic repositioning strategy.
They read the two labels on television. “In Wise, you find: Potatoes. Vegetable oil. Salt. In Pringle’s, you find: Dehydrated potatoes. Mono- and diglycerides. Ascorbic acid. Butylated hydroxy-anisole.”
Sales of Pringle’s came tumbling down. From a respectable 18 percent of the potato chip market to 10 percent. A far cry from P & G’s goal of 25 percent.
Oddly enough, research isolated another problem. The most common complaint against Pringle’s is that they “taste like cardboard.”
It’s exactly what you might expect from a consumer exposed to words like “diglycerides” and “butylated hydroxy-anisole.” Taste, esthetic or gustatory, is in the mind. Your eyes see what you expect to see. Your tongue reacts the way you expect it to react.
If you were forced to drink a beaker of dihydrogen oxide, your response would probably be negative. If you asked for a glass of water, you might enjoy it.
That’s right. There’s no difference on the palate. The difference is in the brain.
Recently the Cincinnati giant changed its strategy. Pringle’s would become an “all natural” product.
But the damage had already been done. In politics or packaged goods, the rule is once a loser, always a loser. It would be as hard to bring Pringle’s back as to bring Jimmy Carter back.
In some small corner of the brain is a penalty box marked “loser.” Once your product is sent there, the game is over.
Go back to square one and start all over again. With a new product and a new game.
Of all companies, Procter & Gamble should have known the power of repositioning. And should have taken steps in advance to protect Pringle’s.
One of P & G’s most powerful programs is the one for Scope mouthwash. P & G used two words to reposition Listerine, the King of Halitosis Hill.
“Medicine breath.”
These two words were enough to torpedo Listerine’s highly successful “the taste you hate, twice a day” theme.
The Scope attack carved a few share points out of market leader Listerine and firmly established Scope in second place.
The Listerine/Scope battle caused the usual casualties. Micrin and Binaca folded. Lavoris saw its market share wither away.
But let’s face it. Scope has not become the market success it should be, based on theory.
Why? Look at the name again.
Scope? It sounds like a board game from Parker Brothers. Not like a good-tasting mouthwash that will make you a big hit with the opposite sex. If Scope had been given a name like Close-Up toothpaste, it could have parlayed its brilliant repositioning strategy with sales success to match.
The success of the Tylenol, Scope, Royal Doulton, and other repositioning programs has spawned a host of similar advertising. Too often, however, these copycat campaigns have missed the essence of repositioning strategy.
“We’re better than our competitors” isn’t repositioning. It’s comparative advertising and not very effective. There’s a psychological flaw in the advertiser’s reasoning which the prospect is quick to detect. “If your brand is so good, how come it’s not the leader?”
A look at comparative ads suggests why most of them aren’t effective. They fail to reposition the competition.
Rather, they use the competitor as a benchmark for their own brand. Then they tell the reader or viewer how much better they are. Which, of course, is exactly what the prospect expects the advertiser to say.
“Ban is more effective than Right Guard, Secret, Sure, Arrid Extra Dry, Mitchum, Soft & Dry, Body All, and Dial,” said a recent Ban ad. The reader looks at an ad like this and asks, “What else is new?”
If disparagement were illegal, every politician would be in jail. (And many husbands and wives would be in deep trouble too.)
Actually, the Federal Trade Commission deserves much of the credit for making repositioning ads possible—at least on television.
In 1964 the National Broadcasting Company dropped its ban on comparative advertising. But nothing much happened. Commercials are expensive to produce, a few advertisers wanted to produce two versions. One to run on NBC and one to run on the other two networks.
So in 1972 the FTC prodded the American Broadcasting Company and the Columbia Broadcasting System to allow commercials that named rival brands.
In 1974 the American Association of Advertising Agencies issued new comparative ad guidelines which represented a complete turnaround from previous policy. Traditionally, the 4A’s had discouraged the use of comparative ads by its member agencies.
In 1975 the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which controls radio and television in Britain, gave the green light for “knocking” ads in the U.K.
So repositioning has been “legal” for at least a decade.
In the past advertising was prepared in isolation. That is, you studied the product and its features, and then you prepared advertising which communicated to your customers and prospects the benefits of those features. It didn’t make much difference whether the competition offered those features or not.
In the traditional approach, you ignored competition and made every claim seem like a preemptive claim. Mentioning a competitive product, for example, was considered not only bad taste but poor strategy as well.
In the positioning era, however, the rules are reversed. To establish a position, you must often not only name competitive names but also ignore most of the old advertising rules as well.
In category after category, the prospect already knows the benefits of using the product. To climb on his or her product ladder, you must relate your brand to the brands already in the prospect’s mind.
Yet repositioning programs, even though effective, have stirred up a host of complaints. Many advertising people deplore the use of such tactics.
An old-time advertising man put it this way. “Times have changed. No longer are advertisers content to huckster their own wares on their own merits. Their theme now is how much better their product is than any other. It is a deplorable situation, with TV as the worst offender, where competitive products are pictured and denigrated before the eyes of millions. There should be some kind of regulation to restrict that type of unethical marketing.”
“Comparative advertising is not against the law,” said the chairman of a top 10 agency, “nor should it be. But to practice it as we do today makes a mockery of pretensions to culture and refinement and decent corporate behavior.”
You can’t have it both ways. If you want culture and refinement, you produce operas. If you want to make money, you produce movies.
Culture and refinement may be admirable qualities, but not in advertising.
Is society sick when people are ready to believe the worst about a product or person, but balk about believing the best?
Are newspapers wrong to put the bad news on the front page and the good news in the back along with the society columns? (If they print any at all.)
The communication industry is like gossip. It feeds on the bad news, not the good.
It may not be your idea of the way things should be. It just happens to be the way things are.
To be successful in this overcommunicated society of ours, you have to play the game by the rules that society sets. Not your own.
Don’t be discouraged. A little disparagement may be preferable in the long run to a lot of conventional “brag and boast.”
Done honestly and fairly, it keeps the competition on their toes.