Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Review
An insightful look into the challenge of positioning your product in the prospect's mind.
Chapter List
Chapter 1. What Positioning Is All About
Many people misunderstand the role of communication in business and politics today. In our over communicated society, very little communication actually takes place. Rather, a company must create a “position” in the prospect’s mind. A position that takes into consideration not only a company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well.
Chapter 2. The Assault on the Mind
There are just too many companies, too many products, too much marketing noise. The per-capita consumption of advertising in
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Tylenol, for example, repositioned aspirin.
Chapter 9. The Power of the Name
The most important marketing decision you can make is what to name the product. The name alone has enormous power in an over communicated society.
Chapter 10. The No-Name Trap
Companies with long, complex names have tried to shorten them by using initials. This strategy seldom works.
Chapter 11. The Free-Ride Trap
Can a second product get a free ride on the advertising coattails of a well-known brand? In the case of products like LifeSavers gum, the answer is no.
Chapter 12. The Line-Extension Trap
Line extension has become the marketing sickness of the past decade. Why it seldom works.
Chapter 13. When Line Extension Can Work
There are cases, however, of successful line extension (GE, for example.) A discussion of when to use the house name and when to use a new name.
Chapter 14. Positioning a Company: Xerox
Xerox owns the copier position. But as Xerox moves into the office automation field, how should the company be positioned?
Chapter 15. Positioning a Country: Belgium
The answer to the problems of a national airline like Sabena Belgium World Airlines is to position the country, not the airline.
Chapter 16. Positioning an Island: Jamaica
“Sand and surf” has become a visual cliché for all Caribbean islands. How do you establish a unique position for one of them?
Chapter 17.
Communication is extremely important within an organization. "To understand work and organizations in today's changing global environment, we must look both at what's going on inside the organization and at the larger culture in which an organization operates" (Cheney, Christensen, Zorn, Ganesh 2011, p1). Communication enables an organization to begin a dialogue to create awareness, understanding, and appreciation for the firm's strategic goals, ideally resulting in the satisfaction of the interests of both the firm and its environment (Schultz, Hatch, Larsen, Van Riel 2002) . This paper will analyze the communication effectiveness of Chickasaw Nation Industries, Inc. (CNI).
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
The competitive nature of business resulted in the imaginative use of advertisements. They could incorporate items, events and people that resonated well with their target market to boost sales. This led to the rethink and expansion of the advertising industry. It now consists of the businesses that need to advertise, agencies that create them; involving visualizes, designers, production managers, researchers and actors, and the media that transmits the adverts. A sizeable portion of many businesses’ funds is
Short names require much less space making it easier to include them on brochures and business
“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
Sometimes it’s not so important that your product fits the exact needs of the segment you target; rather, it’s vital that customers perceive that you do, even if it’s not true. In order to achieve this, the proper amount of advertising and sending the appropriate message are both vital.
Developments of a more appealing offer for each segment so that the customers are more likely to be delighted or at least satisfied. Positioning is the process of placing the product in a clear distinctive and desirable place in the mind of the competitors in order to gain an upper edge.
Advertising techniques have changed and along with it, the impact they have on each individual’s mind. While there are some similarities between the different kinds of advertisements we see today, there are also many differences. Advertising has also become more unethical than it was in, let’s say, the 50s. Not all advertisements are brainless; there are a few that are even creative and fun and just pull the target audience in by
Xerox hopes to avoid mistakes of the past by having “a system to prevent technology from leaking out of the company”, according to Robert V. Adams, president of XTV. They have a $30 million dollar fund to support this intrapreneurial activity. It has supported a dozen start-ups thus far, only two having failed. These are extremely promising numbers, with 83% of ventures coming to fruition.
In the book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, two authors, Ries and Trout, illustrate how efficient positioning a product can affect the recognition of the target market. In addition, it is an outside-in approach to the business marketing. In other words, the marketer considers a business with the prospect’s mind rather than the products. First and foremost, the authors introduce the concept of positioning---“Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect” (Ries & Trout, 1986). Moreover, the past strategies for marketing no longer match the present market, and Ries and Trout believe that communication itself is a big problem. Since our society is “over-communicated,” customers might receive overwhelming information. People’ s minds can only collect a narrow amount of information and it blocks out the rest of irrelevant information; therefore, this can explain the reason why some advertisements fail to attract the attention of consumers. The authors provide several statistic data to support their statement about the over-communicated world. Obviously, 57% of the world’s advertising is offered by the United States, America publishes more than 30,000 books per year, and the average of American family watches around 51 hours per week of television. Therefore, American customers receive too many messages from different mediums, such as television, books, and
Business communication can be defined as the process of sharing information among business professionals, prospective customers, and affiliates who are associated with an organization. The essential skills of business communications are currently in demand and highly required for the workforce for the modern workforce. To be an effective communicator is to have the ability to respond with skill, confidence, and assertiveness and is pertinent to the quality and expertise business professionals considered for employment. Hence, knowing how to communicate properly in an organizational structure requires the skill of communication necessary to interact with different levels of management. In a world
“Advertising is far from impotent or harmless; it is not a mere mirror image. Its power is real, and on the brink of a great increase. Not the power to brainwash overnight, but the power to create subtle and
"The naming of the product, service or company is called branding. A brand or name is the label that consumers associate with your product. For this reason, a brand or name should help communicate the product's positioning and its inherent drama for the consumer" (Roman G. Hiebing Jr and Scott W. Cooper; The successful marketing plan, a disciplined and comprehensive approach; 2003).
Major advantage with this option is the fact that Xerox operates in the market it fully knows, dominates and controls. As a market leader, having gained clear edge over main competitor IBM, Xerox can consolidate its position with the introduction of innovative new product "Book-In-Time solution" that could significantly reduce the publishing costs.
Acceleration Media CEO Tony Sousa claims the world of media is changing at an unprecedented rate as technology disrupts the established business models for publishing and advertising, as consumers change the way in which they consume information, services and entertainment (Sousa, 2013). Mass media advertising as we know it today is perishing. Advertising agencies have had to restructure their advertising models to accommodate a harsher advertising climate. This forces brands to formulate effective ways to reach their customers. The main factor contributing to traditional advertisings’ impending demise is the invention of new forms of technology, namely the internet. The creation of the internet has resulted in the fragmentation of media and markets. Media fragmentation is the breaking up of large audiences into smaller audience fragments due to the increase of media choices available (Tuten, 2008). Advertising has to spread further, covering a multitude of channels to gain the same exposure (Rust & Oliver, 1994). Media platforms provide endless benefits,