Positioning: The Battle for your Mind

Positioning: The Battle for your Mind
Al Ries and Jack Trout
1980

Positioning: The Battle for your Mind is a foundation of marketing canon. It’s on pretty much every list of must-read copywriting books, and is probably one of the first books to call out positioning as a part of marketing.

My general take

The good: Solid introduction to the idea of positioning, and lots of great examples of good and bad positioning. Also very easy to read. You can smash through it in a weekend; by Sunday afternoon, you’ll be much better-equipped to think about positioning.

The less good: Authors Al Ries and Jack Trout are ad men to their core. To them, every business problem is an advertising (and positioning) problem. This leads them to some fairly absurd conclusions - such as recommending that an airline could become far more successful, just by changing its name. They’re also incredibly confident, probably from years of wooing clients with sales pitches. But this confidence means they make some fairly bold claims that don’t really stand up to scrutiny.

Overall: Worth reading, although take the advice and conclusions with a pinch of salt.

the problem positioning solves

In 1980, people were consuming more content than ever before, and with it, more advertising than ever before. This created a problem that has only compounded today: an “overcommunicated society.” Getting your message across in this fog of white noise is challenging at best, impossible at worst.

At the same time, products couldn’t sell themselves the way they did in the 50s and 60s. The 50s and 60s were something of a golden age in the USA. Heaps of new, affordable products were coming on the market every year, and it was fairly easy to sell them, because all you needed to do was call out the new, killer feature. But by 1980, this had reached a bit of diminishing returns. A 1980 washing machine might be a bit better than a 1979 model, but not to the same extent a 1955 washing machine was compared to a 1954 model. Improvements had become incremental, and therefore harder to sell to people.

Finally, competition was fierce. There were more companies in every industry than ever before. So even if you did manage to sell people on your “new and improved” washing machine (or whatever), it would only give you an edge for a nanosecond or two, before someone replicated it.

This is a big reason why this book is still so relevant, 40 years later. An overcommunicated audience (thank you, social media), hard-to-differentiate products and stiff, global competition. These are all problems keeping marketing managers up at night, all around the world.

That’s where positioning comes in: by attaching your message to an existing position in your customer’s mind, they can do a lot of the work for you.

what is positioning?

Positioning is when you articulate your product in relation to ideas already in your audience’s mind. This is effectively a shortcut; rather than explain from scratch what you do and why you matter, positioning helps you scaffold off existing ideas. Positioning is crafting a marketing message that is aware of its context in the audience’s life.

A ladder

The most useful idea from the book is the concept of a “ladder in your prospect’s mind.” We naturally categorise things and give them a “rung” on that ladder. Once something is on its rung, it’s very hard to dislodge. So when you’re positioning your own product or service, you should think about what the existing rungs are, and how you can work around and within them, rather than try to replace one of them.

One great example is the “Uber, but for . . .” trope. Almost everyone knows what Uber is. They understand how it works and where its value comes from. So by positioning a product as “Uber, but for [doctors, tradespeople, landscapers,], you’re attaching yourself to the existing “Uber” rung in peoples’ minds.

That’s just a basic example. The book goes more in-depth with a few different ways to do this:

Be first

If you’re the first and/or #1 player in a space, your positioning is essentially done for you. Watties tomato sauce, Xerox photocopiers, Apple iPhones, Uber for rideshare (more on that later). Ries and Trout argue that if you are in this position, your job is actually to market the wider thing you’re selling, rather than your own business. For example, since Xerox had the top position as photocopier supplier in customers’ minds, their job was to promote photocopying in general, because people sold on photocopying would naturally gravitate towards a Xerox photocopier.

I think this is true in some circumstances, but it’s not as universally true as Ries and Trout think it is. Apple, for example, works very hard not just to sell smartphones, but to differentiate their smartphones from everyone else’s. This is in spite of the fact that they were the first to carve out that rung, and still occupy a top space on that rung. But it is true in other circumstances. Online accounting software provider Xero has a rock-solid hold on that rung in New Zealand. So their New Zealand strategy is to position their product as an alternative to spreadsheets, piles of paper, calculators and so on.

This is a good example of one of the book’s main weaknesses - Ries and Trout are very confident ad men, and I bet they dazzle in a pitch. But that confidence leads them towards some very firm , broad-brush statements that sometimes don’t stand up to scrutiny.

POsition against #1

The annoying thing about being #1 is that, by definition, there can only be one. If you’re not lucky enough to be that company, one way to worm your way into peoples’ minds is by positioning yourself against the #1 player. This uses the existing rung that the #1 player has carved out, but shows your point of difference.

The iconic example is Avis car rentals. In the 60s and 70s, Hertz was by far the #1 car rental provider. Avis was #2. So rather than attack Hertz head-on, Avis leaned into their #2 position, with “we try harder” as their slogan. This used Hertz’s existing position against them - and led Avis to record-breaking growth in profits.

There’s a whole bunch of ways to do this. Two straightforward ones are to position yourself as cheaper or more expensive than whoever you’re going up against. Successfully being cheaper means reducing services in ways that your competition can’t match. For example, low cost airlines do this by not including meals or checked bags as part of ticket prices, and limiting the number of airports they’ll fly to. Conversely, a private jet does the opposite, for a lot more money. Both of these approaches position against the large, full-service airlines. In other words, they use the existing rung these larger airlines have carved out for themselves, then show what they offer that that rung does not.

Another way to do this is to position as the ideal solution for a segment of your competition’s audience. By doing this, you can play off the existing rung your competition has carved out, but position yourself as the ideal solution for a small part of that rung’s audience.

zoomy positions against #1

This is what local rideshare provider Zoomy does. Zoomy’s main competition is a global behemoth: Uber. Uber has both of its feet very firmly on the “rideshare” rung of the ladder. When you think of ridesharing, you think of Uber. And when you think of Uber, you think of things like:

Very affordable, compared to a taxi
Global company
#1 player, so it doesn’t take that long to get a ride

Zoomy could compete with Uber head-on. They could say they have lower prices, more drivers, a better app. And even if those things were true (I don’t know if they are), it would be a real challenge to overcome the massive headwinds that come from competing with the #1 provider in the world.

So take a look at what Zoomy have done instead:

Rather than compete head-on, Zoomy has competed against the negative interpretations of Uber’s brand. A global company is nice if you’re travelling, but it also means all the profits go overseas. Affordable rides are good for consumers, but not great for the drivers on low wages.

Zoomy has positioned themselves as an alternative for people who find these things important. They’re essentially offering a different product - but it’s easy to articulate, because it’s scaffolding off what people already know about Uber.

reposition your competition

This is one of the more aggressive positioning strategies. Repositioning your competition is not about just listing benefits you have that they don’t. That’s just comparative advertising, and it’s a hiding to nothing. Repositioning your competition is about highlighting aspects of your competition that put your product in a positive light.

For example, if you ran an electric car company, and you were competing with a company that sold petrol-powered utes, comparative advertising would be to compare things like acceleration, comfort, noise and so on. And you could make a convincing case for your electric car, but it would probably go right over your prospects’ heads, because it would take paragraphs and paragraphs to get across.

Repositioning would be highlighting the amount of carbon a petrol-powered vehicle spits out into the atmosphere. This changes the conversation away from features and benefits, and towards a new position: which car is better for the environment?

What’s in a name?

Ries and Trout spend a decent amount of the book fixating on the power of a brand’s name. This was one of the weakest parts of the book. Essentially, they argue that the name of your product or service solidifies your position in peoples’ minds. This may be true in extreme cases, but I think it is basically the least of your worries.

For example, they give the example of Eastern Airlines, which was the fourth-largest domestic carrier in the USA at the time. They reckon it could be much higher if it had a different name, because “Eastern has a regional name that puts it in a different category in the prospect’s mind than big nationwide names like American and United.”

Maybe. But probably not. Because one of the biggest airlines in the USA right now is none other than Southwest Airlines.

A name only takes you so far - your business positioning (IE, what you focus on and what you ignore), and the way you articulate that, are way more important than Ries and Trout will have you believe.

wrapping up

As I said, it’s a good book. It gets you thinking about positioning, and how you can position your product or service in a way that efficiently gets your message across, appeals to an underserved market, or both. The main problems are:

It has a very b2c focus. The principles hold just as true for business-to-business marketing, and it would have been nice to see a few examples.
Its conclusions are not always super robust (CF, Eastern Airlines)
It sometimes applies an advertising lens on wider business problems.

Still, definitely worth reading. Go buy yourself a copy.