Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

(How to be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace)

Authors: Al Ries and Jack Trout

Publisher: McGraw-Hill
ISBN: 0-07-137358-6

The Big Deal

In author Jack Trout's preface to the book, he describes positioning a being all about "understanding the psychology of the mind and how you can manipulate perceptions to make whatever you're selling more attractive." Given that today's consumers are overly exposed to marketing messages and have therefore developed ways to tune them out, positioning provides a way to break through the clutter and own a spot in the consumers' mind.

Why Read It?

This book is considered a classic for a reason. It makes a revolutionary (at the time it was published) assertion that in developing marketing communications, one should not focus on the product but on the consumer, particularly, the place the product holds in the consumer's mind. Prior to the introduction of this concept, marketers tend to have unrealistic expectations of their marketing communications. For example, marketers used to set out to "educate the market" on a particular product, ignoring the fact that the human mind rejects information that does not match its prior experience. So communications touting that one's product is "the best" will only be ignored by the consumer's whose experience with the product does not match what the communications say. Now, two decades after its first publication, the book's premise is still being studied and has graduated from a buzzword to becoming an established rule.