How do you get started on a positioning program?
It’s not easy. The temptation is to work on the solution without first thinking through the problem. Much better to think about your situation in an organized way before leaping to a conclusion.
To help you with this thinking process, here are six questions you can ask yourself to get your mental juices flowing.
Don’t be deceived. The questions are simple to ask but difficult to answer. They often raise soul-searching issues that can test your courage and your beliefs.
Positioning is thinking in reverse. Instead of starting with yourself, you start with the mind of the prospect.
Instead of asking what you are, you ask what position you already own in the mind of the prospect.
Changing minds in our overcommunicated society is an extremely difficult task. It’s much easier to work with what’s already there.
In determining the state of the prospect’s mind, it’s important not to let corporate egos get in the way. You get the answer to the question “What position do we own?” from the marketplace, not from the marketing manager.
If this requires a few dollars for research, so be it. Spend the money. It’s better to know exactly what you’re up against now than to discover it later when nothing can be done about it.
Don’t be narrow-minded. You must look at the big picture, not the details.
Sabena’s problem is not Sabena, the airline, but Belgium, the country.
Seven-Up’s problem is not the prospect’s attitude toward lemon/lime drinks, but the overwhelming share of mind occupied by the colas. “Get me a soda,” to many people, means a Coke or a Pepsi.
Looking at the big picture helped Seven-Up develop its successful uncola program.
Most products today are like 7-Up before the uncola campaign. They have weak or nonexistent positions in the minds of most prospects.
What you must do is to find a way into the mind by hooking your product, service, or concept to what’s already there.
Here is where you bring out your crystal ball and try to figure out the best position to own from a long-term point of view. “Own” is the key word. Too many programs set out to communicate a position that is impossible to preempt because someone else already owns it.
Ford failed to position the Edsel successfully. One reason was there simply was no room in the mind of the auto buyer for another heavily chromed, medium-priced car.
On the other hand, when Richardson Merrill was trying to position an entry in the cold-remedy field against Contac and Dristan, it wisely avoided a direct confrontation. Leaving these two to fight it out in the daylight hours, Richardson Merrill chose to preempt the “nighttime cold remedy” position for Nyquil.
Nyquil turned out to be the most successful new product they have introduced in recent years.
Sometimes you can want too much. You can want to own a position that’s too broad. A position that can’t be established in the prospect’s mind. And even if it could, it couldn’t be defended against the assaults of narrowly based products like Nyquil.
This, of course, is the everybody trap, and one example is a famous campaign for a beer called Rheingold. This brewery wanted to preempt New York City’s working class. (Not a bad objective when you consider the large number of heavy beer drinkers in this group.)
So they produced some marvelous commercials featuring Italians drinking Rheingold, Blacks drinking Rheingold, Irish drinking Rheingold, Jews drinking Rheingold, and so on.
Well, rather than appeal to everybody, they ended up appealing to nobody. The reason was simple. Prejudice being a basic human commodity, the fact that one ethnic group drank Rheingold sure didn’t impress another ethnic group.
In fact, all the campaign did was alienate every ethnic group in New York.
In your own career, it’s easy to make the same mistake. If you try to be all things to all people, you wind up with nothing. Better to narrow the focus of your expertise. To establish a unique position as a specialist, not as a jack-of-all-trades generalist.
The job market today belongs to the people who can define and position themselves as specialists.
If your proposed position calls for a head-to-head approach against a marketing leader, forget it. It’s better to go around an obstacle rather than over it. Back up. Try to select a position that no one else has a firm grip on.
You must spend as much time thinking about the situation from the point of view of your competitors as you do thinking about it from your own.
Prospects don’t buy, they choose. Among brands of automobiles. Among brands of beer. Among brands of computers. The merit, or lack of merit, of your brand is not nearly as important as your position among the possible choices.
Often to create a viable position, you must reposition another brand or even an entire category of product. As Tylenol did to aspirin, for example.
Notice what happens when you fail to deal with the competition. Bristol-Myers spent $35 million to launch Nuprin, and American Home Products spent $40 million to launch Advil. Both products contain ibuprofen, an analgesic new to America.
But both campaigns failed to reposition Tylenol, the dominant headache remedy on the market. As a result, neither product has been able to carve out more than a tiny market share.
Coming to grips with the competition is the main problem in most marketing situations.
A big obstacle to successful positioning is attempting to achieve the impossible. It takes money to build a share of mind. It takes money to establish a position. It takes money to hold a position once you’ve established it.
The noise level today is fierce. There are just too many me-too products and too many me-too companies vying for the mind of the prospect. Getting noticed is getting tougher.
During the course of a single year, the average human mind is exposed to some 200,000 advertising messages. When you remember that a 30-second $500,000 Super Bowl commercial can make only one of those 200,000 impressions, the odds against an advertiser today must be seen as enormous.
This is why a company like Procter & Gamble is such a formidable competitor. When it bets on a new product, it will slide $50 million on the table, look around at the competition, and say, “Your bet.”
If you don’t spend enough to get above the noise level, you allow the Procter & Gambles of this world to take your concept away from you. One way to cope with the noise-level problem is to reduce the geographic scope of your problem. To introduce new products or new ideas on a market-by-market basis rather than nationally or even internationally.
With a given number of dollars, it’s better to overspend in one city than to underspend in several cities. If you become successful in one location, you can always roll out the program to other places. Provided the first location is appropriate.
If you can become the No. 1 scotch in New York (the No. 1 scotch-drinking area of the country), you can roll out the product to the rest of the U.S.A.
You can think of our overcommunicated society as a constant crucible of change. As one idea replaces another in bewildering succession.
To cope with change, it’s important to take a long-range point of view. To determine your basic position and then stick to it.
Positioning is a concept that is cumulative. Something that takes advantage of advertising’s long-range nature.
You have to hang in there, year after year. Most successful companies rarely change a winning formula. How many years have you seen those Marlboro men riding into the sunset? Crest has been fighting cavities for so long they’re into their second generation of kids. Because of change, a company must think even more strategically than it did before.
With rare exceptions, a company should almost never change its basic positioning strategy. Only its tactics, those short-term maneuvers that are intended to implement a longterm strategy.
The trick is to take that basic strategy and improve it. Find new ways to dramatize it. New ways to avoid the boredom factor. In other words, new ways to have Ronald McDonald end up eating a hamburger.
Owning a position in the mind is like owning a valuable piece of real estate. Once you give it up, you might find it’s impossible to get it back again.
The line-extension trap is a good example. What you are really doing when you line-extend is weakening your basic position. And once that’s gone, you are adrift without an anchor.
Levi’s line-extended into casual clothes. And then found its basic position in jeans undermined by “designer label” jeans.
Creative people often resist positioning thinking because they believe it restricts their creativity.
And you know what? It does. Positioning thinking does restrict creativity.
One of the great communication tragedies is to watch an organization go through a careful planning exercise, step by step, complete with charts and graphs and then turn the strategy over to the “creatives” for execution. They, in turn, apply their skills and the strategy disappears in a cloud of technique, never to be recognized again.
An institution like this would have been much better off running the flip-chart with the strategy on it rather than the ad with thousands of dollars worth of creativity applied.
“Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.” This doesn’t sound like an ad. It sounds like the presentation of the marketing strategy. In truth, it’s both.
Do your advertisements for yourself match your position? Do your clothes, for example, tell the world that you’re a banker or a lawyer or an artist?
Or do you wear creative clothes that undermine your position?
Creativity by itself is worthless. Only when it is subordinated to the positioning objective can creativity make a contribution.
The question sometimes arises: Do we do it ourselves or do we hire someone to position us?
The someone that often gets hired is an advertising agency. An ad agency? Who needs help from those Madison Avenue hucksters?
Everybody. But only the rich can afford to hire an advertising agency. All the others have to learn how to do it themselves. Have to learn how to apply the invaluable ingredient only available from the outsider.
And what does the outsider supply? An ingredient called ignorance. In other words, objectivity.
By not knowing what goes on inside a company, the outsider is better able to see what is happening on the outside. In the mind of the prospect.
The outsider is naturally attuned to outside-in thinking, while the insider is more comfortable with inside-out thinking.
Objectivity is the key ingredient supplied by the advertising or marketing communication or public relations agency.
In a word, magic. Some business managers believe that the role of an advertising agency is to wave a magic wand which causes prospects to immediately rush out and buy the product.
The wand, of course, is called “creativity,” a commodity much sought after by the neophyte advertiser.
The popular view is that the agency “creates.” And that the best agencies are filled with a substance called “creativity” which they liberally apply to their advertising solutions.
In advertising circles, the story is told about an advertising agency that was very creative. So creative, in fact, it could take straw and spin it into gold.
Now you might have heard of them because they had a very creative name. Rumplestiltskin, Inc.
The legend lives on. Even today, some people think agencies are so creative that they can spin straw into gold.
Not true. Advertising agencies can’t spin straw into gold. If they could, they’d be in the straw-spinning business and not the advertising business.
Today, creativity is dead. The name of the game on Madison Avenue is positioning.