Summary: Positioning The Battle For Your Mind – Al Ries and Jack Trout

No matter how brilliant you are, it never pays to cast your lot with a loser. Even the best officer on the Titanic wound up in the same lifeboat as the worst. And that’s if he was lucky enough to stay out of the water

The essence of positioning is that you give up hope of being everything to everyone and focus on dominating one specific niche. Smaller is better. You make more sales not by selling to everyone but just to a narrowly defined market niche.

They must move competitors out of a mental position they had previously occupied in the mind of the prospect, simply through use of facts consumers may not previously have been aware of.

Positioning is all about how your product or service is perceived in the mind of a prospective customer or client. Positioning is not what you do to a product, but how you can change the name, the price, the packaging or other elements to secure a worthwhile position in the prospect’s mind.
The basic goal of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to connect your product or service meaningfully to the mental perceptions that already exist in the mind of prospective customers.

The filtering process is highly selective. People will generally only accept new information that aligns with their previous perceptions, and reject anything that does not. In essence, they will see only those things they want to see, and reject everything else.

Positioning suggests that new brands, new products and new services should be selectively compared to existing brands or products in such a way as to create a clear and concise sustainable competitive advantage for the new offering.

Most people naturally assume marketing wars between competing products occur in the open marketplace. In reality, however, marketing wars are won or lost in just one place - in the minds of prospective customers.

The basic goal of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to connect your product or service meaningfully to the mental perceptions that already exist in the mind of prospective customers.

“Hitch your wagon to a star.”