Jack Trout never wrote “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind”.
April 1st, 2007Well, not according to Wikipedia anyway. This is the entry:
A product’s position is how potential buyers see the product. Positioning is expressed relative to the position of competitors. The term was coined in 1969 by Gary Sinclair and Marty Reilly in the paper “Positioning” is a game people play in today’s me-too market place” in the publication Industrial Marketing. It was then expanded into their (my bolding - dk) ground-breaking first book, “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind”.
There is a lot of argument about the power of Wikipedia, its accuracy and what it can do to your brand. This is probably someone’s prank (as anyone can edit the page) but either way, I don’t think Jack and Al will be too impressed with this attribution. Or what it does to their respective brands. People take Wikipedia seriously after all…
PS: Scroll to the bottom of the wikipedia entry and you’ll see they are mentioned in the references,
April 1st, 2007 at 10:20 pm
the big question for me is how much or what percentage of the advertising budget should be spent on positioning the brand vs. driving sales leads…in addition tracking the effectiveness of positioning spending is problematic
April 2nd, 2007 at 8:55 am
Hi Mary, I think balancing priorities and opportunities is probably the hardest part of marketing. Your post made me think about that issue and here is my ten cents worth: (with the luxury of knowing nothing about your business)
I’m not sure that positioning the brand requires a separate campaign. I see the process of introducing yourself to your target market, to getting their permission to market to them, to making an offer and completing the sale as one. Clearly, how well you position away from your competitors is particularly important in the first introduction.
If your brand is completely unknown, you may spend more budget on introducing yourself to your target market, on getting their permission to market to them.
When it comes to tracking, you might offer something for free, which will allow you to track the result of your permission/introduction campaign.
If you have a very well known brand with a strong position you might spend more time and budget on creating and communicating specific offers. As you can tell, your particular circumstances drive a fair bit of this. I guess this is one of the challenges we all face in marketing; there are no set solutions to problems because so much depends on your particular product, brand reputation, market and competitors.
April 3rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
[…] I emailed Jack Trout to let him know about the wikipedia entry on Positioning which showed the names of Gary Sinclair and Mart Reilly as the authors of his (and Al Ries’) legendary marketing book. Between my email and my blog post on the subject, someone has changed it back to “Jacques Trout” (Jacques??) and Al Ries. Looks like it was just a bit of vandalism. So in some ways Wikipedia works; it is self-correcting, as supporters would say. […]