Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind By Jack Trout And Al Johnson

Every day, companies present the people with advertisements everywhere they go. Advertisements have become very prevalent in today’s society nowadays focusing in on a negative connotation. Advertisement has become an effective way for producers to display their new products. In present day, they come in forms of billboards, flyers, e-mails, and even text messages. It is widely known that companies create advertisements to persuade people to buy specific products or goods; however, it is not widely known that advertisements can make a negative impact on today’s society. The companies manipulate people’s mind and emotions, swaying people by new promotions and therefore generating a strong desire to fit into the society, that causes them to make inessential expenditures. Advertisements pose a critical impact on the American culture.

As the article “what we are to Advertisers” by James B Twitchell informs that Advertisers use the strategy of positioning to attract consumers to their product. Positioning is a marketing strategy that exerts a brand to get the attention of customers. The product itself doesn’t even have to attract the consumer, the advertiser just needs to make an ad that creates a spark into people's minds. Although a product might be similar to its competitors, an ad can make a difference with how they are interpreted. Twitchell makes to understand that even though all of us are put into a category, we somehow all connect.

The average United States Citizen views about 5000 advertisements a day (Johnson). Advertising is everywhere. Billboards on the way to work, ads on the internet, and paper products such as magazines or newspapers display a sale or a promotion of a good or service. Usually, the ad will give a brand or company name, and uses the product’s merits to draw the consumer closer. This has grown exponentially as advertisements in media in 1970 were estimated to be 500 a day, a ten percent increase in the last 48 years. (Johnson). This is due to the rise of technology, as the computer has become a household gadget within the new millenium. These advertisements are meant to give a synopsis of the product or service’s purpose, quality, and efficiency. If a consumer views 5000 advertisements in a single day and assuming the commercials do not repeat, 5000 goods or services are introduced. With more options to choose from in such little time, the consumer has a harder time differentiating the quality and perhaps necessity of the product. The marketers rely on the quick, impulsive decision making of consumers. With the misleading nature of many infomercials or radio broadcasts, the people of American society are bombarded with constant propaganda, thus making seemingly harmless promotions more potent to filling industries’ pockets and lessening the common population’s

“There are over 250 billion advertisements released to the public every year with the average person seeing over 3000 ads every single day” (Kilbourne). This is an astronomical amount of information for anyone to process in a week let alone in one day. This is a prime example of Capitalism at it’s finest. Controlling the consumer in every aspect of their lives. Jean Kilbourne also talks about how “Only 8 percent of an advertisement is actually processed by the conscious mind, with the other 92 percent being soaked up by the subconscious” (Kilbourne). Thinking about those numbers really brings into perspective how much we are truly influenced by media

Over the last few decades, American culture has been forever changed by the huge amount of advertisement the people are subjected to. Advertising has become such an integral part of society, many people will choose whether or not they want to buy a product based only on their familiarity with it rather than the product’s price or effectiveness. Do to that fact, companies must provide the very best and most convincing advertisements as possible. Those companies have, in fact, done

Now ads are everywhere. With the ads like that it increases the sales, how much their product is seen, and how much the company itself is viewed. They’re on just about every website on the internet, and they are even calling your phones to say, “hey buy me.” This all deals with how technology has changed. How we advertise is just a nice way of saying how we package details. “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible” (Gladwell P. 200). It’s amazing when you look back in research, or in your mind and see the difference in advertising then, and advertising now.

For advertisements sell distracting, purposeless visions? … Perhaps, by learning how advertising works, we can become better equipped to sort out content from hype, product values from emotions, and salesmanship from propaganda” (O'Neill 416). As O’Niell states, advertisements often change a consumer’s mind through persuasiveness and use of rhetorics. To some extent, consumers are not given the chance to buy a product because they faithfully trust it, rather because they are duped into believing it is a fantastic product than what it is worth. This is shocking because a consumer’s decision making power is stolen by the corporations. Corporations want maximum profit and use of their product, so they are more likely to use insincere language to persuade the consumer the best way possible.

People see up to 5,000 commercials a day (Johnson); additionally, a number of individuals feel that these advertisements are simply informative. Actually, they are choked full of fallacies which deviously influence peoples spending. Granted, advertisements are an important element in the business world and a thriving economy because of its information, it is manipulative due to the fact that it distorts a human’s view on a psychological level by embellishing, disregarding the entire truth, and appealing to an individual’s deepest desires.

Advertisements have the phenomenal ability to either convince, inform, or entertain someone in a matter of seconds. Because of this, advertisements over the past few decades have grown immensely. According to SJInsights viewers are “exposed to over five-thousand brands and advertisements each day” (Johnson). These advertisements include commercials, internet based ads, and print advertisements. With the continuous growth of social media platforms and technology, viewers can only expect this number to go anywhere but up.

Companies have been advertising their goods since consumerism was created Street merchants in . In the 21st century, it is hard to go a day without seeing an advertisement.

Have you ever flicked through a magazine nonchalantly and been stopped flat by some image that you just couldn’t pull your eyes away from? If so then the advertisement did its job, and may even be worth the chunk of change it cost to produce. The people of the United States have seen and heard about countless products for so many years, and that has brought about a problem for the corporations putting the ads out. With so many ads pushing into the heads of the American public, there has been desensitization and a growing accustomed to all the advertisements. If the consumer does not pay attention to the ad then the company has wasted money on an unsuccessful tactic to secure more business. This problem is a large driving force behind

The verdict of whether the ads campaign too often in a period of time lies on the general rules in business mantra. Rule no. 1 is ‘customer is always right’ and rule no. 2 is ‘if the customer is wrong, go back to rule no 1’. The correlation between these 2 ties (marketers and consumers) is largely implicit and works hand in hand. In one side, marketers have to ‘educate’ consumers about their product or services gradually through every mean of promotional mix (personal or non-personal). Failure to do so will keep them out of the league and could result as a marketer’s caveat. On the other side, the dynamism of consumers’ needs and demand evolves in a much unpredicted cycle and pattern. The external environment forces such as demographic, technological, economic and natural forces have a direct correlation in determining the consumer needs and buying decisions.

Advertising has always been an important part of our society. The history of advertising can be traced to pre-modern history when it served an important purpose by allowing sellers to effectively compete with other merchants for the attention of clients in Ancient Egypt. From 1704 when the first newspaper advertisement was announced, it gradually grows into a major force in American society based primarily on newspapers and magazines (Ad Age Advertising Century, 1999). It not only helps to raise the target demographics’ awareness of issues, but also educate consumers with the benefits of the product. However, advertising cannot target a particular person before the emerging of World Wide Web.

Published: April 23, 2012 Author: Carmen Nobel Upgrades to existing product lines make up a huge part of corporate research and development activity, and with every upgrade comes the decision of how to brand it. Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek teamed up with London Business School's Marco Bertini to suss out the best practices for naming next-generation products. Key concepts include: • Companies often take one of two tacks in naming a next-generation product—the sequential naming approach or the complete name change approach. • Experimental research showed that each naming approach affects customer expectations. With a name change,

Did you know that in the course of an average day you are bombarded by over three thousand advertisements? (Faigley 93) From bus stations and newspapers, to e-mails, television, and music videos, today's marketers are finding innovative ways to make their advertisements sophisticated and appealing so that they can lure consumers to their products. How has this phenomena occurred? This “strategic advertising” is not as complicated as it sounds. In fact, businesses use a formula-like approach when creating such advertisements. In order to be a savvy consumer, I recommend that you be aware of these techniques.