Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout

• “Failure to communicate” is the single, most common, most universal reason given for problems that develop.
• Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first over communicated society. Each year, we send more and receive less.
• Positioning starts with a product.
• To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the reality that really counts is what’s already in the prospect’s mind.
• Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the pase. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.
• 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 min, 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.
• 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.
• You have to jettison the ambiguities, simply the message, and then sigmoid it some more if you want to make a long-lasting impression.
• Truth is irrelevant. What matters are the perceptions that exist in the min. The essence of positioning thinking is to accept the perception as reality and then restructure those perceptions to create the position you desire.
• 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 et your message accepted by another human mind.
• In communication, more is less.
• Our extravagant use of communication to solve a host of business and social problems has so jammed our channels that only a tiny fraction of all messages actually get through.
• Scientists have discovered that a person is capable of receiving only a limited amount of sensation. Beyond a certain point, the brain go blank and refuses to function normally.
• Ironically, as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up.
• The easy way to get into a person’s mind is to be first.
• If you didn’t get into the mind of your prospect first (personally, politically, or corporately), then you have a positioning problem.
• In today’s marketplace the competitor's position is just as important as your own. Sometimes more important.
• To find a unique position, you just 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.
• More than anything else, successful positioning requires consistency. You must keep at it year after year.
• In truth, outright failure is often preferable to mediocre success.
• A company stick with a losing position is not going to benefit much from hard work.
• At almost every step of the way, the leading brand has the advantage.
• Leaders can do anything they want to. Short-term, leaders are almost invulnerable. Momentum alone carries them along.
• Leaders should use their short-term flexibility to assure themselves of a stable long-term future. As a matter of fact, the marketing leader is usually the one who moves the ladder into the mind with his or her brand nailed to the one and only rung.
• As long as a company owns the position, there’s no point in running ads that scream, “We’re No. 1.”
• The essential ingredient in securing the leadership position is getting into the mind first. The essential ingredient in keeping that posisint is reinforcing the original concept. The standard by which all others are judged. In contrast, everything else in an imitation of “the real thing”.
• Getting to the top is tough. Staying there is much easier.
• What works for a leader doesn’t necessarily work for a follower. Leaders can often cover a competitive move and retain their leadership. But folders are not in the same position to benefit from a covering strategy. When a flower copies a leader, it’s not covering at all. It’s better described as a me-too response. Sometimes a me-too response can work for a follower. But only if the leader does not move rapidly enough to establish the position.
• Most me-too 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 launch your attack while the situations is fluid. Before the leader has time to establish leadership. With a more massive advertising and promotion launch. And a better. Name.
• “Look for the hole” in the prospect’s mind is one of the best strategies in the field of marketing.
• Too often greed gets confused with positioning thinking. Charging high prices is not the way to get rich. Being the first to establish the high-price position with a valid product stori in a category where consumers are receptive to a high-priced branch is the secret of success. Otherwise, your high price just drives prospective customers away.
• Your high price must have a real difference to justify the price. If nothing else, it rationalizes the spending of more money.
• The bulk of the business is in one direction, but the opportunity lies in the opposite.
• A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products. And you build brands by using positioning strategies, starting with a good name.
• The biggest single mistake that companies make is trying to appeal to everybody. The everybody trap.
• In other words, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out.
• 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 of conflict either. The crux of a reposisinting program is undercutting an existing concept, product, or person. Conflict, even personal conflict, can build a reputation overnight.
• People like to see the high and mighty exposed. Thye like to see those bubbles burst.
• Tase, 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.
• To be successful in this over communicated society of ours, you have to play the game by the rules that society sets. Not your own.
• Shakespeare was wrong. A rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. Not only do you see what you want to see, you also smell what you want to smell.
• What worked in the past won’t necessarily work now or in the future. In the past when there were fewer products, when the volume of communication was lower, the name wasn’t nearly as important. Today, however, a lazy, say-nothing name isn’t god enough to cut into the mind. What you must look for in  anime that begins the positioning process. A name that tells the prospect what the product’s major benefit is.
• A strong, generic-like, descriptive name will block your me-too competitors from muscling their way into your territory. A good name is the best insurance for long-term success.
• No brand will live forever. Products get out of date, services get out of date, even names get out of date. The smart company will not waste money defending the past, but rather will launch new brands to take advantage of the opportunities created by change.
• One of the things that makes positioning thinking difficult for many people is the failure to understand the role of timing.
• In naming people or products, you should not let your competitors unfairly preempt words that you need to describe your own products.
• When you want to change a strongly held opinion, the first step to take is usually to change the name.
• The first step in overcoming negative reactions is to bring the product out of the closet. To deliberately prioritize the situation by using a negative name.
• Special-interest groups recognize the power of a good name.
• A better tactic is to turn the name around. That is, to reposition the concept by using the same words to turn the meaning inside out.
• Even better is to rename the opposition before the powerful name takes root.
• The name is the first point of contact between the message and the mind. It’s not the goodness or badness of the name in an esthetic sense that determines the effectiveness of the message. It’s the appropriateness of the name.
• A bad name doesn’t get any better no matter how many years you have been using it.
• There is only negative equity in a bad name. When the name is bad, things tend to get worse. When the name is good, things tend to get better.
• But to be well known, avoid using initials. A fact known by most politicians.
• You can’t make a set of initials famous unless you first make the name famous.
• The primary reason name selection errors are so common is that executives live in an ocean of paper. Letters, memos, reports. Swimming in the Xerox sea, it’s easy to forget that the mind works aurally. To utter a word, we first translate the letters into sounds.
• When words are read, they are not understood until the visual/verbal translator in your brain takes over to make aural sense out of what you have seen.
• The mind works by ear, not by eye. This is one of the most useful conceptual ideas in the entire book. Before you can ile away a picture in the mind, you have to verbalize it.
• Radio is really the primal media. And print is the higher-level abstraction. Massages would “sound better” in print if they were designed for radio first. Yet we usually do the reverse. We work first in print and then in the broadcast media.
• One reason why the principles of name selection remai so elusive is the Charles Lindbergh syndrome. If you get into the mind first, any name is going to work. If you didn’t get there first, then you are flirting with disaster if you don’t select an appropriate name.
• When a really new product comes along, it’s almost always a mistake to change a well-known name on it. The reason is obvious. A well-known name got well known because it stood for something. It occupies a position in the prospect’s mind. A really well-known name sits on the top rung of a sharply defined ladder. The new product, if it’s going to be successful, is going to require a new ladder. New ladder, new name. It’s as simple as that.
• In politics, in marketing, in life, anonymity is a resource, easily squandered by too much publicity.
• Inside-out thinking is the biggest barrier to success. Outside-in thinking is the biggest aid.
• The consumer and the manufacturer see things in totally different ways.
• One of the reasons for the continuing popularity of line extension is that in the short term, line extension has some advantages.
• One of the keys to understanding the line-extension issue is to separate the short-term effects from the long-term effects.
• The pattern of early success followed by line extension followed by disillusionment is fairly common.
• So we offer some rules of the road that will tell you when to use the house name and when not to.
• Expected volume. Potential winners should not bear the house name. Small-volume products should.
• Competition. In a vacuum, the brand should not bear the house name. In a crowded field, it should.
• Advertising support. Big-budget brands should not bear the house name. Small-budget brands should.
• Significance. Breakthrough products should net bear the house name. Commodity products such as chemicals should.
• Distribution. Off-the-shelf items should not bear the house name. Items sold by sales reps should.
• It’s hard to change a mind once a mind has been made up.
• You can position anything. A person, a product, a politician. Even a company.
• A company may be able to make more money by diversifying. It should think twice, however, about trying to build a position based on that concept.
• A good place to start a corporate positioning program is with clear, concise definition of what a company is. But the best corporate positioning programs go beyond just a definition. The best programs do the job with actions, not just words. Or sometimes the words themselves represent the action.
• It’s a basic principle of positioning to avoid the areas that everyone else is talking about. The fas, if you will. To make progress, a company has to strike out on its own into new, unexplored territory.
• In the business of corporate positioning, the perception of leadership is something you can cash at the bank. Whether you’re a chemical company, a bank or an automobile manufacturer, when your customers are impressed, you will always do better than your competitors.
• The perceptions of people living in a place are often different from those visiting it.
• Pictures alone won’t build a position in the mind. Only words will do that. To create an effective positioning program, you have to “verbalize the visuals”. Alliteration can also be an effective memory device in this process.
• In this over communicated society, the only hope is the simple idea.
• The lesson here is that positioning may require you to oversimplify your communications. So be it. There is no other way. Confusion is the enemy. Simplicity is the holy grail.
• The solution to a positioning problem is usually found in the prospect’s mind, not in the product.
• It doesn’t really matter what customers think about your company and your products or services. The thing that counts is how your company compares with your competitors.
• The best positioning ideas are so simple that most people overlook them.
• The human mind tends to admire the complicated and dismiss the obvious as being too simplistic.
• The start of any major communication efort often needs some drama to get people’s attention. The emotion of the film medium is ideal for this kind of effort. (Which is also why television is so powerful a tool for new product introductions.)
• The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one species concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect’s wall of indifference.
• Anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing lousy. If it wasn’t worthwhile doing, you shouldn’t have done it at all. On the other hand, if it is worthwhile doing and you wait until you can do it perfectly, if you procrastinate, you run the risk of not doing it. Ever. Therefore, anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing lousy.
• Your reputation will probably be better within the company if you try many times and succeed sometimes than if you fear failure and only try for sure things.
• Trying harder is rarely the pathway to success. Trying smarter is the better way.
• The truth is, the road to fame and fortune is rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult for the ego to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can do for you than on what you can do for yourself.
• No matter how brilliant you are, it never pays to cast your lot with a loser.
• You can’t do it yourself. If your company is going nowhere, get yourself a new one.
• “Hitch your wagon to a star,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Good advice then. Even better advice now. If your boss is going places, chances are good that you are too.
• Most of the big breaks that happen in a person’s career happen because a business friend recommended that person.
• The more business friends you make outside of your own organization, the more likely you are to wind up in a big, rewarding job.
• It’s not enough just to make friends. You have to take out that friendship horse and exercise it once in a while. If you don’t, you won’t be able to ride it when you need it.
• Everyone knows that an idea can take you to the top faster than anything else. But people sometimes expect too much of an idea. They want one that is not only great, but one that everyone else thinks is great too. There are no such ideas. If you wait until an idea is ready to be accepted, it’s too late. Someone else will have preempted it.
• To ride the “idea” horse, you must be willing to expose yourself to ridicule and controversy. You must be willing to stick your neck out. And take a lot of abuse. And bude your time until your time comes.
• 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 over communicated society is an extremely difficult task. It’s much easier to work with what’s already there.
• What you must do is to find a way into the mind by hooking your product, service or concept ito what’s already there.
• Too many programs set out to communicate a position in that is impossible to prompt because someone else already owns it.
• 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.
• 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.
• With rare exceptions, a company should almost never change its basic positioning strategy. Only its tactics, those short-rem maneuvers that are intended to implement a long-term strategy.
• 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.
• Creativity by itself is worthless. Only when it is subordinated to the positioning objective can creativity make a contribution.
• To be successful today at positioning, you must have a large degree of mental flexibility. You must be able to select and use words with as much disdain for the history books as for the dictionary.
• You must select the words which trigger the meanings you want to establish.
• Words are triggers. They trigger the meanings which are buried in the mind.
• Most people are insane. They’re not completely sane and they’re not completely insane. They’re somewhere in between.
• The sane person constantly analyzes the world of reality and then changes what’s inside his or her head to fit the facts. That’s an awful lot of trouble for most people. [...] It’s a whole lot easier to change the facts to fit your opinions.
• Unsane people make up their minds and then find the facts to “verify” the opinion. Or even more commonly, they accept the opinion of the nearest “expert”, and then they don’t have to bother with the facts at all. (Word of mouth.).
• Language is the currency of the mind. To think conceptually, you manipulate words. With the right choice of words, you can influence the thinking process itself.
• To be successful in the positioning era, you must be brutally frank. You must try to eliminate all ego from the decision-making process. It only clouds the issue.
• One of the most critical aspects of positioning is being able to evaluate products objectively and see how they are viewed by customers and prospects.
• Only an obvious idea will work today. The overwhelming volume of communication prevents anything else from succeeding.
• Often the solution to a problem is so simple that thousands of people have looked at it without seeing it. When an idea is clever or complicated, however, we should be suspicious. It probably won’t work because it’s not simple enough.