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The law of positioning in ads

By: Cicely K. Leblanc

Advertising is a vital tool in the marketing world. Many factors should be addressed for advertising to be a successful. One of those main factors is positioning.

Poisoning solves the dangerous Grime of Being in the wrong place at the Right Time, Developed to find ways of finding room for new products in highly developed markets, poisoning became a chief educative idea in the world’s developing markets.

The poisoning idea challenges an idea that is the heart and soul of the advertising community: that the primary function of advertising is to communicate. “Tell more, sell more” was the old advertising saying.

Advertising is not communication; advertising is poisoning. The best advertising communicates little pertaining the product or service. What the best advertising does, however, is to set up and support a position in the customer’s mind.

Marketing people used to talk about the 4 P’s: promotion, price, place, product. Now they talk about the 5 P’s, the original four plus positioning. And no company could begin a new brand without first writing a positioning. When you study these poisoning statements, you can perceive where marketing people have gotten off track in general.

They are written from the company’s point of view. We want to locate our brand as the premier product in the category. What’s wrong with a positioning statement like this? Everything. It leaves the customer out of the equation. A positioning statement should be made from the customer’s point of view: There’s an open hole in the mind for a premium product in the category.

The Open Hole
Price is the easiest hole in the mind to understand and it’s one of the easiest holes to fill.
Haagen-Dazes decision to introduce a more costly line of ice cream set up the “premium” ice-cream position for the brand and made Haagen-Dazs one of thelastingmarketing successes of the past several decades.

What Haagen-Dazs did in ice cream, Heineken did in beer. It was the first brand to occupy the high-priced beer position in the mind.

Then the folks at Anheuser-Busch decidedthat if Heineken was the first high-priced imported beer, then they could occupy the position as the first high-priced imported beer, a position that the Anheuser-Busch Michelob brand occupies today.

High price is only one of the open holes in the mind. Low price is another. What Haagen-Dazs Heineken and Mercedes did at the high end, brands like Wal-Mart and South west Airlines have done at the low end.

Minds can change. Stolichnaya was the first vodka to occupy the high-priced position in the mind. As time went on and the Cold War heated up, Americans were turned off by a Russian vodka like Stolichnaya. So Absolute moved smartly into the high-priced vodka position. Today Absolute outsells Stolichnaya in the US by about three to one.

How many price holes are there in a typical mind? It depends on the category. Basically there are three: the regular brand, the low priced brand and the high-priced brand. When you own 3 brands that occupy all three positions, you can be said to win the Triple Crown of Branding.

Anheuser-Busch, for example, has Busch, the largest-selling, low–priced beer; Budweiser, the largest-selling regular beer; and Michelob, the largest-selling high-priced beer.

In some categories, there is room for an “ultra high-priced” brand. Today, Grey Goose Vodka, for example, is growing faster than Absolut and is not far behind Stolichnaya in sales, and is sure to pass the Russian brand sometime in the future.

“Country of origin” is another understandable hole in the mind. Toyota was the first to fill the Japanese imported-car hole and became the leading brand. They did it once more with Lexus, which became the leading high-priced Japanese automobile brand.

Some consultants have called this positioning strategy, “the first-mover advantage,” however that is not so. It’s an advantage, but it’s not the reason that most leader brands got to be leader.

It’s the “first minder” advantage. That is, the brand that gets into the mind first is the winner, not necessarily the brand that is first in the category. For instance, Duryea was the first automobile on the road, however never got into the mind. Ford was the first automobile in the mind.

The New Category
Sometimes there are no open holes in the customer’s mind and you have to create one. We name this positioning strategy; “create a new category you can be first in.” Gatorade, for instance, was the first sports drink. Developed in the 1960s by a team of doctors to add the Gators football team at the University of Florida the band now does over $2 billion in worldwide sales.

PowerBar was the first energy bar and now controls this fast growing market. Some critics, certainly, believe this is only wordplay. PowerBar to them is just a candy bar with a different name to help users diminish their guilt feelings about eating a candy bar.

May be there is little actual difference between a candy bar and a powerBar, but not so in the mind. users consider them to be two different categories.

The Number-two Brand
Purchasers like choice. At times you can build a powerful brand just by giving users an variety to the leading brand.

However what approach can best deliver the number-two position? May be if we can produce a improved product than the leader,” goes the thinking. “we won’t necessarily overtake them, however we will wind up in the number two position.”

This is the worst possible move for a customer live number two brand why? For the reason that the better product cannot win in the marketplace even if users expect it to prevail. As a matter of fact, there is a strong maxim, or belief, in the minds of users that “the best product or service prevailin the marketplace.”

While everyone believes that the better product will prevail in the marketplace, the worst possible approach for any company is to attempt to produce a “improved product.” Why is this so? Because the leader in your field has already created the perception of producing the improved product.

If you attempt to claim that your product is superior, the customer thinks, “No, it can’t be superior; otherwise it would be the leader.” Yet what do most companies attempt to do? They try to (1) produce a superior product and (2) communicate that difference to customers and customers. While it’s easy to do (1), it’s almost impossible to do (2).

Is Royal Grown cola a superior tasting cola than coca-cola? Royal Grown thinks so and their research shows that 57% of customers prefer the test of Royal Crown cola to coca-cola Classic. That’s a pretty big difference.

However, the better tasting cola (Royal Grown) has only 2% of the cola market. What they need to do, you might be thinking, is to communicate that difference. Well they’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. “That can’t be,” the customer thinks. “If Royal Crown were the better-tasting cola, it would be the leader, not coke. There have got to be something wrong with the research.”

In fact, the Royal crown company hired an independent research organization to perform one million taste tests comparing its product with Coca-cola. Would 10.000.000 tastes tests have made a difference?

No. You believe what you want to believe and if you believe that the improved product prevailin the marketplace, then you think coca-cola have got to be the improved product because it is the leader. Then how do you become a strong number-two brand? You become the opposite of the leader.

Coca-cola is the old, established brand which means that your parents drank coca-cola. So Pepsi-cola said, “You don’t want to drink what your parents drank, you’re the Pepsi Generation.”

The Specialist
Every coffee shop in American sells coffee, but they also sell hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, apple pie, doughnuts, and dozens of other foods and beverages. So Starbucks specialized in coffee and became a very successful brand. So did McDonald’s, which specialized in hamburgers.

And Dunkin’ Donuts which specialized in doughnuts. And subway which specialized in submarine sandwiches. The largest air-cargo company in America was Emery Air Freight. What Kind of services did Emery offer?

Everything – large packages, mall packages, overnight delivery, inexpensive two – and three – day deliveries. So Federal Express specialized in “small packages, overnight” and became a much more successful brand than Emery. Enterprise Rent-Car specialized in the “insurance replacement” business and became the largest car-rental company in America.

The Channel Brand
Hanes was the largest-Selling Panty-hose brand in department stores in America, but Hanes had a problem. Women were not shopping at department stores regularly enough. Consequently the company wanted to enlargeits distribution.

Supermarkets were the rational alternative. (Women visit a supermarket almost twice a week.) Consequently Hanes developed a secondbrand for supermarket distribution only. The “L’eggs” name was particularly good alternative because it was a double entendre (legs and eggs).

To support the name, the product was packaged in a plastic container that seemed like an egg. L’eggs, the 1st supermarket panty-hose brand, became the largest-selling panty-hose brand in the country.

The Gender Brand
Sometimes you can build a brand by concentrating on half the market. Marlboro became a big brand by positioning itself as the first cigarette for men. Virginia slims became a big brand by positioning itself as the first cigarette for women. Right Card became a big brand by positioning itself as the first deodorant for men.

The “Bad Name” Problem
Complicating the search for an open hole in the mind is the issue of the name. You can’t put a square peg in a round hole and you can’t fill a hole in the mind with a bad, or inappropriate, name.

Ralph Lifshitz was a young fashion designer in New York who hoped for better thing. Consequently he changed his name to Ralph Lauren and made his Polo brand into the most successful fashion brand in the world. Could he have accomplished his goal with the name polo Ralph Lifshitz? nNo.

Many Asian names will not work outside of Asia. Names like Daewoo, Daihatsu and Matsushita are difficult to pronounce and difficult to spell outside of Asia. When the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo company started to advertize its products in the US, the company alteredits name to Sony. A good move. Many Asian companies that want to build worldwide brands will have to do the same.

The “One Name, Two Holes” Problem
Then there is the challenge of attempting to use the samename to fill two different holes. Xerox, the leading brand of office copier, endeavored to tangle with the mainframe computer market with the Xerox name. It was a disaster. Are there successful examples of line extension? Definitely, but these in general happen in weak markets where no single brand prevails the category.

Or they happen with weak brands with little identity in their categories. That means, if your brand doesn’t stand for anything in one category, you can move it to another category where it won’t stand for anything either.

The “Moving-the-Hole” Problem
Some Companies believe they can alter what their brands represent. So Volkswagen is attempting to sell a one hundred thousand US dollar automobile called the Phaeton. And Mercedes-Benz is attempting to sell $20,000 A-class Vehicles.

You can deepen a hole, you can broaden a hole, but the one thing you can’t do with a hole is move it. When a brand is unwaveringly set up in the mind, it can on the odd occasion, if ever, be moved to a new location.

You can’t go wrong, however, if you take your mind off your product, your brand, and your company and focus instead on the mind of the consumer. That’s where you can win and that’s where you can also lose.