Marketing Positioning

What a strange word, “positioning.” Its origins are shrouded in the fog of history. The popular marketing writers, Jack Trout and Al Ries, started talking about position or positioning in 1972 or thereabouts, and took credit later for having invented positioning. However, I believe that positioning was an emerging concept and a term, in at least limited use, within the marketing and advertising community at the time that Trout and Ries first wrote about it. Certainly, the basic concepts of positioning were not new in 1972. The term “positioning” was described by Trout and Ries as the basic position in the consumer’s mind occupied by a brand. They saw positioning as an antidote to the “over-communicated” society, in which consumers were drowning in a sea of advertising messages. The key, they argued, was to occupy a unique position in the consumer’s mind to cut through all of the confusion caused by brand proliferation and advertising clutter.

The term “positioning” is widely used within the marketing and advertising communities today, and its meaning has expanded beyond the narrow definitions of Trout and Ries. Positioning is often used nowadays as a broad synonym for marketing strategy. However, the terms “positioning” and “marketing strategy” should not be used interchangeably. Rather, positioning should be thought of as an element of strategy, a component of strategy, not as the strategy itself.

The term “positioning” is, and should be, intimately connected to the concept of “target market.” That is, a brand’s positioning defines the target audience. For example, an airline might position itself against other airlines, which defines the target audience as airline travelers. Or, it might position itself against all modes of transportation between two destinations, which then defines the target audience as all travelers between those two markets. The second positioning reaches out to a much larger target audience.

Another example: A brand of peanut butter