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The law of positioning

By: Cicely K. Leblanc

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

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

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

They are written from the company’s point of view. We want to position 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 need be formulated 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 expensive line of ice cream set up the “premium” ice-cream position for the brand and made Haagen-Dazs one of thelong-termmarketing 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. Generally 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 instance, 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 instance, 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 clear 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,” but 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 example, Duryea was the first automobile on the road, but 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 example, 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 dominates this fast growing market. Some critics, obviously, believe this is only wordplay. PowerBar to them is just a candy bar with a different name to help purchasers moderate their guilt feelings about eating a candy bar.

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

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

Nevertheless what approach can best deliver the number-two position? Perhaps if we can produce a enhanced product than the leader,” goes the thinking. “we won’t necessarily overtake them, but we will wind up in the number two position.”

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

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

If you try to claim that your product is better, the customer thinks, “No, it can’t be better; otherwise it would be the leader.” Yet what do most companies try to do? They try to (1) produce a better 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 better 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.

Nevertheless, 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 disparity. 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.”

Essentially, the Royal crown company hired an independent research organization to conduct 1000000 taste tests comparing its product with Coca-cola. Would 10 million tastes tests have made a difference?

No. You believe what you want to believe and if you believe that the enhanced product succeedin the marketplace, then you think coca-cola have got to be the enhanced 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 challenge. Women were not shopping at department stores repeatedly enough. So the company wanted to increaseits distribution.

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

To strengthen the name, the product was packaged in a plastic container that seemed like an egg. L’eggs, the first 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 aimed at better thing. So he changed his name to Ralph Lauren and made his Polo brand into the most successful fashion brand in the world. Could he have completed 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 tricky to spell outside of Asia. When the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo company started to market 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 trouble of striving to use alikename to fill two different holes. Xerox, the leading brand of office copier, endeavoured to enter the mainframe computer market with the Xerox name. It was a cataclysm. Are there successful examples of line extension? Indeed, but these in general happen in weak markets where no single brand rules 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 consider they can change what their brands represent. So Volkswagen is endeavoring to sell a one-hundred thousand US dollar automobile called the Phaeton. And Mercedes-Benz is endeavoring to sell twenty thousand US dollar 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 built in the mind, it can hardly, if ever, be moved to a new location.

You can’t go wrong, but, 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.

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