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POSITIONING: The Battle of your Mind
BY: Jack Trout and Al Ries
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind is a book that shows one how to use powerful and innovative techniques to capture the biggest market share and become a household name, build one's strategy around the competitor's weaknesses, use the present position to its best advantage, choose the best name for the product, determine when and why less is more, and analyze trends that can affect one's positioning. The book provides ample illustrative cases as well as for positioning correctly.
Book Review
The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already in the mind and to retie the connections that already exist. The question most frequently asked by positioning skeptics is, "Why?" Why do we need a new approach to advertising and marketing? The answer is that we have become an over communicated society. In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word: "Positioning." The best approach to take in our over communicated society is the oversimplified message. Since so little of your message is going to get through anyway, you ignore the sending side and concentrate on the receiving end. You concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect, not the reality of the product. By focusing on the prospect rather than the product, you simplify the selection process. You also learn principles and concepts that can greatly increase your communication effectiveness.
The Assault on the Mind
One reason our messages keep getting lost is the number of media we have invented to serve our communication needs. Another reason is, the number of products we have invented to take care of our physical and mental needs. And how does the average person cope with the product and media explosions? Not very well. Studies on the sensitivity of the