By Al Ries, American Author
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 contest your courage and your beliefs.
1. What Position Do You Own?
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.
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 than to discover it later when nothing can be done about it.
2. What Position Do You Want to Own?
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. “Give 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 Seven Up before the cola campaign—they have weak or nonexistent positions in the minds of most prospects. What you must do is find a way into the mind by hooking your product, service, or concept to what's already there.
3. Who Must You Outgun?
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 products, as Tylenol did to aspirin.
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 in 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.
4. Do You Have Enough Money?
A big obstacle to successful positioning is funding. A positioning strategy requires enough money to implement it properly. If you don't have enough money, you might not be able to establish a strong position in the marketplace. Look for ways to economize. You can always roll out the program to other places, provided the first location is appropriate. If you can become the number one Scotch in New York, the number one Scotch-drinking area of the country, you can roll out the product to the rest of the USA.
5. Can You Stick It Out?
You can think of our over-communicated 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 long-term 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 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.
6. Do You Match Your Position?
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 number two in rented 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, a lawyer, or an artist? Or do you wear creative clothes that undermine your position?
Creativity is 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: Rumpelstiltskin Incorporated. 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.
