I’m talking about the Doritos’ commercial on the Super Bowl last Sunday. Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division (owner of the Doritos brand) ran a series of Super Bowl ads which cost them some serious coin.

CBS charged $2.6 million for a 30 second Super Bowl spot this year (up just a bit from the $37,500 for Super Bowl I). If Frito-Lay paid the sticker price were talking $10.4 million for a couple of minutes of air time. But with 106.5 million viewers– the largest in television history – they had an historic opportunity to sell some chips.

So with about $10 million invested and 106 million prospects to talk to, they communicated a message of great clarity: eating Doritos will bring you physical pain.

I kid you not.

One of the ads takes place in the exercise room of a gym. One guy – headband, sweat pants – offers his buddy – tank top, gym shorts – some Doritos, which he takes.

Then headband tells gym shorts that he got the Doritos “out of Tim’s locker.” This comment strikes such fear in the heart of gym shorts that he spits a partially eaten Dorito from his mouth and delivers this line, “This is bad. Tim loves Doritos.”

Gym shorts is then struck in the side of the neck by a Dorito in the incarnation of a steel, ninja throwing dart, and falls over.

Cut to Tim: a psycho, covered in Doritos like the creature from the Black Lagoon with orange splotches, who attacks headband screaming.

Fade to black.

Makes you hungry, doesn’t it?

There was another commercial in the series that has the young son of an attractive black woman sharply slapping his mother’s suitor for checking out his mom as she walks into the kitchen and then taking a Dorito from a bowl on the coffee table. Junior is peeved and the sound effects of the slaps are loud and vicious.

Yet another shows a man sitting on a bench eating Doritos. A dog approaches and looks at the man longingly. The man won’t give the dog a chip unless he barks for it. The dog, unknown to the guy on the bench, is wearing a bark suppressing collar. The clever canine somehow gets behind the bench, removes the electronic device, straps it around the man’s throat, who falls to the ground spasming from a series of agonizing electric shocks to his larynx.

See, here’s the deal: ads are supposed to sell something; they are supposed to create a want for the product in the mind of the viewer.

Maybe some people were amused by Fiddo’s electric revenge or the attack of the Dorito-maniac. Maybe.

But the question is, did these ads increase the desire for a bag of Doritos? Sorry. No sale.

I later found out that these particular ads were the winners of a contest created by Frito-Lay for consumers to shoot home based commercials for Doritos to be played on Super Bowl commercial breaks.

Clever marketing idea on Frito-Lay’s part, and well done to the budding filmmakers for winning the contest. But the marketing executives that approved the multi-million dollar ad buy should be ordered to read Positioning The Battle for your Mind by Al Reis and Jack Trout on pain of having their corporate Blackberry account canceled – because they sure as hell don’t have a clue what positioning is.

Newsflash: associating your product in the minds of your prospects with slaps, electric shocks, and steel darts might be better suited to promoting a new psychiatric hospital than a snack food.

Google’s Super Bowl ad, on the other hand, was piece of marketing simplicity and effectiveness. It’s called Parisian Love.  It starts with a picture of the Google search box. You don’t see the person, but he types in “study abroad paris france.” And it rolls from there. The viewer watches a love affair develop between the searcher and a woman in Paris, all played out in the sequence of terms rapidly typed into the Google search box.

When the commercial finishes, the viewer knows that he or she can find anything on Google from cafes near the Louvre to how to assemble a crib.

The ad works – just like Google.

Frito-Lay didn’t ask for this assessment of their Super Bowl commercials. Neither did Google. And while the pluses and minuses of these advertisements may seem all too obvious, some of the nuances of many marketing strategies are not so glaring.

This is why corporations large and small have us conduct analyses of their marketing materials. They get a professional, external assessment of the impact and communication value of their websites, brochures, direct mail pieces and public relations messages.

The service is fast and inexpensive and provides them with an external perspective as to how they are communicating to their customers and prospects.

If you think we might be of assistance to you in this way, please contact us at 818-397-1401. Or via our website at  HYPERLINK “http://www.ontargetresearch.com” www.ontargetresearch.com

Best,

Bruce

President & CEO
On Target Research

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Good advertising should create a response – a call, a click of the mouse, a response card mailed in. Something – interest, a reach back. At this point, Marketing has done its job and Sales takes over.

That said, it is appalling to watch the growing number of television commercials that seem to be dedicated to driving the customer away from the advertiser or their product by use of disturbing emotions or themes.
Dairy Queen has been running a commercial that opens with a customer sitting at a table in one of their restaurants taking a bite of a hamburger that is obviously burning his mouth. He quickly exhales uncomfortably. In quick succession, his napkin catches fire. The fire spreads to the table as the customer and then Dairy Queen staff go into full blown panic mode trying to put out the spreading fire.
The footage finally cuts to the man standing on furniture drinking from one of the sprinkler heads on the ceiling, the fire now extinguished.
The commercial ends by showing a Dairy Queen hamburger and telling the viewer that they have a very hot Tabasco sauce.
This commercial is supposed to make viewers want to come into Dairy Queen to eat. Hellooo…?
More basically, the message is that you can get super hot Tabasco sauce on your hamburgers at Dairy Queen. Okay. I don’t know the size of the hot sauce loving demographic, but I’ll acknowledge that there are people who like hot food. My wife is one of them. Raised in New Mexico, she can devour a jar of hot chili peppers in a sitting. You would think she was noshing on chocolate-covered strawberries. Would this commercial make her come in to Dairy Queen? Eh… afraid not. The ad positions Dairy Queen with a freaked out, panic ridden staff trying to put out a fire with a customer who NEVER shows the slightest enjoyment from the meal. Only pain. This attempt at humor, exaggeration or hyperbole is completely lost in the frantic emotion of people putting out a fire.

In another Dairy Queen winner, a young father has his infant son in one of those baby carrier / slings strapped to his chest. Exiting the restaurant, dad is trying to eat one of Dairy Queen’s new desserts when junior, fusing (presumably because he doesn’t get any goodies) accidentally kicks dad in the groin. Dad goes to his knees in pain. The kid then snaps his head back catching dad smartly in the nose. The video cuts to a close up of the dessert and a voice over that promotes how wonderful it tastes. Have these people lost their ever-loving marketing minds? How much money did they spend making and airing a commercial trying to sell ice cream by showing a child kicking his father in the _____.
Miller Lite and ESPN have been running a soap operaish commercial, which has two thirty-somethings watching a baseball game with their uncle who gets up from the couch to answer the doorbell at a tense moment in the game. At the door, he lets in another nephew, who, if you look closely, has some Miller Lite in a bag. The game turns positive and one of the guys runs out to tell uncle Matt only to find him dead on the front porch from a heart attack. The story / commercial, it says, is “to be continued”.
The acting is quite good. So is the directing. Does commercial sell beer? Not on your life. Does it make you “like” Miller Lite, want Miller Lite? Nope. In the first place, the beer is hardly a factor in the commercial. But despite the attempt at subtlety, they associate the product with the death of a sweet old man. Apparently the idea is (and this is just a guess) that the men in the family drink Miller watching ball games. The creators of this ad seemed more interested in getting a writing gig with Stephen Bocho (NYPD Blue, LA Law, Hill Street Blues) than selling beer.
A recent commercial for Mervyn’s, the low end clothing chain, shows women coming out of one of the stores with their hands so full of bags – fingers wrapped around the little rope handles – that they were in pain and their hands were badly crimped. The message is supposed to be that there are so many good deals at Meryvn’s, the shoppers leave loaded with good buys.
But what sticks in the mind as one views the commercial is a woman grimacing at her crimped, arthritic looking hands. You’d think it was an ad for Advil.
Surely there is a way to position Mervyn’s superior values with something other than women with twisted, painful hands.

A Toyota truck commercial has a Gen Y female screaming psychotically at her boy friend as she has his pickup pushed off of a cliff. The truck winds up “on its feet” and looks fine and we are now supposed to want to go buy a Toyota truck because it is sturdy instead of remembering the screaming shrew. Sorry.
There are plenty of fine commercials that deliver a compelling sales message. I have picked on this growing trend because it is just that, growing. It gives the industry a bad name. It is truism of twenty-first century marketing that the competition for consumer attention is beyond fierce.
But that does not change the basic truths of how to communicate a message that will be received and accepted. Positioning rules, and when you try to drive a message into the mind of your prospect with negative and disturbing emotion, the right communication does not take place.
The commercial may win an award, but sales and income suffer. Some forget that is our responsibility – marketing should drive sales.

There is also a self-serving truism here, which is simply this: now more than ever your marketing messages must be based on truly accurate surveys; your positioning laser-precise; your graphics aesthetic, powerful and appealing.
Cut waste, by all means. Get lean and mean for sure. But look at these times as an opportunity to reach out to your prospects with marketing messages that make them sit up, take notice and reach for their phone or browser. Do this and you may just come out of these times with a higher market share than you had when they started.

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The same issue carries an article about brand credentials, brilliant in its simplicity, by none other than the Godfather of positioning, Al Ries.

“Most advertising is mush, especially TV advertising. Thirty expensive seconds wasted trying to proposition the viewer with out providing enough of the brand’s credentials for the consumer to take the offer seriously.”
I ponder this nightly while perusing the Wall Street Journal over dinner as if searching in vain for the meaning of life.
How do US advertisers spend $250,000,000,000 a year (that’s a quarter of a trillion for the mathematically challenged) with the ostensible purpose of selling their products and services using ads that do anything but?
Yes, the agencies create and produce the ads – that’s its own subject – but presumably the CEO or someone in the client’s senior management approves them. I realize I speak heresy of the most inexcusable kind to agency Creative Directors, but here’s a news flash – ads are suppose to sell something.
Branding, the mantra of the last decade or so is fine, so long as it is not done to the exclusion of getting your message across and motivating the prospect to go to your store, or pick up the phone or click the mouse.
A review of ads running in national magazines and print media these days calls to mind the moving and powerful scene portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the great Stanley Kramer film, Judgment at Nuremberg. Lancaster, playing one of several judges who sat on the bench during the Third Reich, on trial for crimes against humanity, sits in stoic silence throughout the trial as Maxamillian Schell, whose academy award winning performance as the group’s defense counsel, tries to convince the Tribunal (chaired by Spenser Tracy) that the judges were not aware of what the Nazi’s were really doing.

During a highly inflammatory cross-examination of Judy Garland’s character (who had fraternized with an old Jewish man) by Schell, Lancaster has finally had enough and stands, his face a visage of fury.
In what may be his most prized performance outside of Elmer Gantry, Lancaster, his voice rising with intensity and volume with each word, tells Schell and the rest of the court that he and the others were aware, and asks in rhetorically outrage…
“Were we DEAF, DUMB, BLIND?”
It is a stirring performance.
Lancaster I am not, but the question applies…are they DEAF, DUMB, BLIND?
I am thumbing through Forbes scanning the offerings like a parent in search of a lost child. There is a picture of a red brick wall that takes up most of the full-page, four color ad. It’s a home builder or construction company, I think, but this is a wild guess. I look more closely because I am writing this newsletter. At the top of the wall is the word Elevate. Perhaps it’s some kind of self-improvement program. I look at the copy that would best be read with the Hubble telescope (Okay, it’s not that small). But I read it (which I would never do under ordinary circumstances). It’s an ad for Conoco Phllips, the oil giant explaining how “…where others see an obstacle, we see a chance to elevate.”
Huh?
Did they have some recent failures and now feel compelled to tell people that they can overcome them? In short, what in the name of John David Rockefeller has this got to do with selling oil and gas?

I have subsequently seen this ad in other business publications- it’s somebody’s brilliant idea for an advertising campaign. Unbelievable. Who signed off on this… this…metaphorical brick wall, this Tony Robbinsesque PR ad? I’m sorry, but what a waste. It may be this kind of executive brilliance that, according to the July issue of Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connection, has seen the “…company’s share price decline 20% last year and generate the lowest return on capital (in the industry) employed over the last three years…”
Come on, this isn’t rocket science. Your advertising dollars should be getting you a reach, a response, a sale.
I don’t care how sexy the girl, how elegant the design, how sophisticated the message, if it doesn’t generate a response that leads to increased sales and income, it hasn’t done its job. Sorry.
I close with what is a self-serving note that nevertheless happens to be true. Your ads should forward a message and a position that have come from the mind/s of your public – not the boardroom. That way they resonate, and generated reach for product or service.
This is the kind of research we have been conducting for clients for almost twenty years. If you want your ads to communicate and generate response. Call us.

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This doesn’t mean the magazine is better… or worse, just that, on the whole, their advertisements deliver their messages with more communication value.

The reason for this is not to be found in a Wharton MBA thesis on the successful strategies of ethnic advertising.

It is simpler than that: their ads are more visual than those of the other weekly magazines we reviewed (Time, Forbes, Fortune).
Most people think the familiar adage, “One picture is worth a thousand words,” is an old Chinese proverb. In fact, it is often attributed to that all time Oriental homeboy, Confucius.
But alas, the C-man missed this one: the phrase was created by ad man Fred R. Barnard, for an advertisement he placed in the industry journal, Printer’s Ink, in 1921.
And Fred’s observation was beyond prophetic, because today, almost a century later, we live in a culture so driven by image that cosmetic surgery is now a right of passage along other ornamentations of the flesh such as piercing and tattoos. But I digress.
We are talking marketing here and the use of images to attract consumer attention has turned the world of commerce into an orgy of the visual.
In case you died in the seventies and are just returning, it’s not just movies and television anymore.
The arsenal in the assault on our senses – in what positioning gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout called The Battle for Your Mind – has exploded like the set of a Madonna concert.

A stroll through Times Square in Manhattan or down Sunset Blvd in Hollywood with their towering, electronic advertisements seems more like a scene from Blade Runner than a walk in a modern American city.
And YouTube has 100 million video view per day…. Yes. Per day. Think about it.
Five hundred channel cable, TiVo, DVDs, digital video, the Internet, email, cell phones, iPods and PDAs have been added to old line communication channels like magazines, newspapers, billboards, and that life blood of the US postal service, direct mail.
So why, as obvious as this seems, are untold millions spent every year on text only ads by corporations whose advertising budgets could retire the national debt of several third world countries? Or, if there are images, why do they do everything but communicate the message the advertiser should be seeking to convey?
It’s not just magazines. An all too telling example appeared in The Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago.
You may have stopped at Starbucks to grab a latté and missed it, but there are only three players still standing in the U.S Wireless wars: Verizon, Sprint (Nextel’s new dad) and Cingular (which, despite a bit of lingering indigestion, devoured AT&T wireless for breakfast a short while ago).
Sprint, for reasons we will leave to their strategic marketing people, has decided to go head to head with Cingular. They’ll get no gripe from me on this, as this kind of competition can drive pricing down and service up.

But if they are going to engage in marketing warfare, why in the name of Alexander Graham Bell would they print two ads in the nation’s leading business Journal with no visuals and text that reads like a petulant third-grader.
Speaking of the Cingular wireless product, Edge, one ad says, “If Cingular’s EDGE is ‘high-speed,’ then Sprint’s broadband is high-high-high-high speed.”
The other says, “Sprint mobile Broadband is 5x faster than Cingular’s EDGE.”
Oh Yeah? My dad’s stronger than your dad.
What a missed opportunity for some instant visual positioning.
We are not a design and graphics house – we do research and surveys that help create market positions – but Dude, they could have done, what?… A tie-in with the release of the new Batman movie – Sprint is the Batmobile, Cingular the hobbling penguin. Or any number of visual positionings, which would have shown the difference in speed at a glance, instead of trying to tell it in words – The Starship Enterprise and an old DC 10; a Daytona racing car and a Model T; one of those Miami Vice muscle boats and a row boat….
The great American author, editor and publisher, Sol Stein makes note of this change as it has affected the literary culture in the last half of the twentieth century in his superlative Stein on Writing. His comments here are for writers, who, incidentally, do not have the opportunity of showing a picture as an ad man does, but note the shift in importance to the visual he points out here:
“In the nineteenth century, novels and stories were filled with summations of offstage events, past or present, almost always told to the reader in summary form. …,
In the mid-century, the advent of television brought a visual medium into homes. Television and movies are full of immediate scenes, visible to the eye, ready to be experienced firsthand. This has influenced stories and novels more than we realize. Twentieth-century audiences now insist on seeing what they are reading.”
Try to make him read it and you may lose him. If you attract him with a visual image then you may be able to tell your story. But the more communication in the image, the better.
The key word here, however, is communication. Just showing any old image is not the answer either. The image must tell the story.
There are some skin care advertisements in the issue of Ebony mentioned above that communicate in a flash. It is not just that the women are beautiful. In the world of models, that is a given. No, there are pictures here of African American women with skin so lustrous you can feel it.
No question of what the product is or what it does, or that it is desirable.
Compare that to a full-page ad in a recent issue of Forbes. On a dark gray back ground are written the words:
WE’RE WITHIN
THE THINGS
YOU CAN’T
DO WITHOUT
At the bottom of the page there is some fine print that I assumed was mandated by the firm’s legal department. Maybe it’s a drug ad, I think, and they are listing the ubiquitous litany of side effects. But because I was writing this newsletter, I squinted mightily and read it.
Surprise. Here we get the actual message (that I would never have bothered to even try to read under ordinary circumstances) that,
“…we provide the software that enables designers to create the electronics inside your PDA and mobile phone.”
Off in the bottom right hand corner of the page, in a box that makes me think of a child playing hooky from school and hiding from the truant officer, is the company’s name: the brand, which happens to be Cadence.
Later, looking again at the ad, I see a fogged-over image in the middle of the page behind the words above. I hadn’t actually seen it on first glance. It’s like an apparition.
I look at it for some time before I realize that it is a hazy picture of a cell phone- at least I think that’s what it is.

I checked the company out on the Internet. They are apparently a very successful software firm. Kudos. But guys, come on… you’re intelligent engineers. Why would you spend the money for a full page ad in a national magazine and not SHOW what you do rather than running a page of copy which seems to have as its main purpose making the reader guess at it.
Do the people who created this ad really think that the busy business executives that thumb through Forbes are going to grok the message on this page, or that they are actually going to read the fine print at the bottom?
Here’s another.
There is a full-page ad in Time by one of the drug company behemoths (aren’t they all). At the top of the page is a headline: “If you have COPD associated with chronic bronchitis, ADVAIR ® helps you breathe easier.*”
Below that is a picture of an older woman and a child. The woman appears to be singing to the little boy who is smiling. But at first glance, it is a little confusing as to exactly what they are doing.

A closer look gives you the idea that the older woman is breathing on the glass and the child is playing tic tac toe on the frosted pane. But you have to study it for a few moments to figure this out.
Besides the lack of clarity in the visuals, I want everyone in the room who has ever heard of COPD or has any idea what COPD is, to raise your hand.
I thought so.
Unbelievably, nowhere on the page – nowhere – does it explain or even define what COPD is. (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)
Compare this to another ad in the health care category in Forbes. The first thing that attracts your attention is a large, very detailed four-color picture of a heart on a visual screen. You can clearly see the many veins and arteries running through the heart. There are two doctors looking at the picture of the heart on the screen talking.
The headline?
“Who is accelerating the diagnosis of HEART DISEASE?”
“WE ARE.”
A bit of text is followed by “SIEMENS” in large bold print.
A quick glance at the heart, the doctors and the brand and…boom, you got it: Siemens makes equipment that provides clear, detailed pictures of the human heart so that diagnoses can be rapid and accurate.
So where does this leave us?
It leaves us raising our glasses in toast to the simple wisdom of Fred Barnes, because a picture is worth a thousand words.
But it also leaves us with the understanding that it must be the right picture that communicates the right message.

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In the winter of 1991, like many here in America, I sat glued to CNN’s coverage of the historic toppling of the statue of infamous founder of the KGB in Dershinky circle near the Kremlin. Little did I know or suspect that 6 months later I would be delivering a seminar to 200 Russian businessmen in Moscow on the use of market research and surveys in developing positioning and branding strategies for advertising, marketing and public relations campaigns.

As it turned out there was a member of the Russian Government in the audience–a Lt. Colonel from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs–the Russian National police. He approached me after my talk, told me how much he had enjoyed it and asked if I would meet with his superior at the Ministry the following day. I looked at my wife, who was with me at the time. She gave me the “Hey, why not?” smile” and we agreed.

And so, the next morning she and I and the Colonel stood in front of the Ministry Headquarters (a huge yellow and white cement structure) awaiting security clearance. Finally uniformed guards came out. They ushered us down long, dark, cement corridors, up four flights of stairs (the elevator was broken) and into the office of Colonel Stanislav Pylov, the Director of Personnel for the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. This man was in charge of the welfare of a million Russian police (they are all federal police in Russia).

We were introduced and made small talk while we nibbled on cookies and sipped a hardy Russian tea. Finally I said “Colonel Pylov, I came to Moscow with some other American businessmen to help open up a business college here how can I help you?”

He got right to the point. “We had 356 policeman killed in the line of duty last year. We must improve the public’s opinion of the police. Can the survey technology you use help us do that?”

I said that it could. With that Pylov broke into a huge smile and stood up. He said that this was the beginning of a new relationship between Russia and America and went to a closet and brought out a beautiful wooden clock and gave it to my wife. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. My imagination ran wild–World Peace; Reagan, Gorbachev, On Target Research!

As it turned out, this was the beginning of a series of seminars and workshops I did for the Ministry over the next year on the use of surveys in public relations efforts. Bear in mind that these guys had a SERIOUS PR problem. They had been beating people over the head with night sticks as the primary communication line with the public for 70 years, and now wanted to improve their image. The first thing of course was a major program in personal communication by the police and it went from there.

But that is not the point of the story. Because of this initial relationship with the Ministry, I made several trips to Russia in the ensuing years. On one occasion I had been invited to speak to a large group of Russian bankers on the use of market research and surveys in advertising and PR campaigns. And as a matter of pure coincidence, a day or two before I was scheduled to leave, USA TODAY ran a 16 page color supplement that was essentially a large advertisement placed by a number of Russian businesses and banks soliciting (desperately needed) US deposits and investment dollars.

As I read the ads, particularly those placed by the banks, I was astounded. I don’t know how many millions of rubles the various companies shelled out for this ad but it had to have been plenty. Just converting rubles to US dollars was, in itself, a Herculean task in those days to say nothing of actually coming up with the money. The crime was that someone had sold these companies this expensive ad space and they didn’t have a clue how to advertise or position themselves–not a clue.

This is not a sob story about how these poor Russian bankers got taken advantage of–it is a marketing point. Here was a golden opportunity for these Russian banks to position themselves in the minds of American businessmen in a manner that might attract hard currency deposits and they did just the opposite.

One bank, positioned itself as “The Youngest Central Bank in the former Soviet Union”. Excuse me, banks are not suppose to be young (and thus) inexperienced and even if they are that is not something one would promote. Banks are supposed to be stable, secure, safe. This comes with longevity, consistency, permanency. This bank could just have well taken out an ad that said, “If you want to take a chance that we will still be here next month, open an account”.

Another bank showed a picture of a lighthouse and positioned itself as a beacon in a storm of financial uncertainty. Well, the beacon part was not bad, clever in fact. But both the graphics and the copy focused on the storm of financial uncertainty. From the viewpoint of an American businessman, beacon or no, why would I even head into that storm when the weather over here was quite pleasant, thank you?

The reason businessmen from Western countries were interested in Russia in the early 90s was OPPORTUNITY. Proper surveys would have found this and a sharp bank who knew its market research would have found what image represented opportunity to this public and so positioned itself as the Gateway to Russian Opportunity or the like. But this kind of market research was about as understandable as Martian to Russian bankers at that time.

You see a communications campaign without a positioning strategy is (to continue the metaphor) like a ship without a rudder. Moreover, this lack of understanding of how to position oneself is not the sole province of our new “comrades” in marketing. Indeed, I am constantly amazed at the enormous sums of advertising and PR dollars that are poured into media campaigns by individuals and companies large and small here in America that have no positioning whatsoever. They may not be as self defeating as “The Newest Bank in the former Soviet Union”, but many lack any positioning strategy at all–the most crucial element of any communications campaign.

I recently talked to a corporate marketing director of a huge international technology company. He had very little idea of the most basic positioning concepts, where they came from or how to use them.

What is Product Positioning?

And so this situation begs the question, What is positioning? Where did it come from? And how do you “do” it?

It all started with a couple of guys named Trout and Reis. Beginning in 1969 and then into the early 70s, these two young marketing geniuses, Jack Trout and Al Ries, wrote, spoke and disseminated to the advertising and PR world about a new concept in communications called positioning. Until then, agencies had primarily been basing their media campaigns on internally conceived benefits of the client’s product.

These campaigns may have been creative, they said, but they would simply no longer get the job done in what had become a heavily over communicated society. There were too many products, being pushed by too many advertising dollars on too many media lines and the prospect’s head was just too full of everyone’s noise for the old kind of advertising to get through and make any kind of impact.

The game had changed, said the boys. If you wanted to reach your prospect, the focus of your campaign could no longer be based on internally conceived benefits,- what management thought was cool -, the target was now the mind of the prospect. You had to focus on the perceptions of the prospect. You had to find a place in the mind of your public in which to put your product.

This was positioning.

Trout and Reis described positioning as follows:

“… positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position (place) the product in the mind of the prospect.”

The way you do that is to tie the product or service to something that is already in the mind. In so doing, you are able to instantly communicate to an audience about something about which they had previously been unfamiliar.

Indeed, business management expert, L Ron Hubbard later researched and wrote about the philosophic basis of positioning and what made it work.

THE UNFAMILIAR IS RAPIDLY INTRODUCED OR COMMUNICATED BY COMPARING IT TO A FAMILIAR.

“Joe knows nothing about practice boxing gloves and there are none there to show him and he will be fairly satisfied if he is given a familiar object, pillows, to compare them to.

And

“Positioning takes advantage of the fact that one can compare the thing he is trying to get the other person to understand with desirable or undesirable objects.”

This technique lets you cut through the noise of the competition and all the other communication messages your audience is being pounded with daily.

This is done by screenwriters and others in Hollywood all the time. It is how they pitch scripts and story ideas. This was humorously depicted in the Robert Altman film of some years ago called THE PLAYER. Periodically during the film they would cut to some screenwriter pitching a story idea to a producer or studio exec.

“Okay, Okay it’s like Patton but in outer space.”

My daughter who is a budding film producer in town recently got a script she likes and is shopping it around.

“What’s the story? What’s it like?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s kind of a female Sling Blade.” Says she.

Now this may or may not be the stuff of huge movie grosses or even critical acclaim, we’ll leave that to Roger Ebert. But, having seen Sling Blade, I instantly had the concept of the movie. It was related to something in my mind. Something with which I was familiar.

A friend is telling me about a great new book he is reading. “What’s it like?” I ask.

“It’s a Tom Clancy like story from the viewpoint of Russia’s ‘new’ KGB.”

Okay, I’ve got a concept of the book.

This, of course, is also is woof and warp of politics.

The person is a “Reagan Republican”, a “Kennedy Democrat”.

Or you can position something as better or worse than what is in the mind. She’s to the left of Karl Marx, slightly to the right of Genghis Khan, richer than Rockefeller.

The Easy Way to Position a Product

The easy way to position a product is to get into the mind first. The first product into the mind will usually dominate the category and be very difficult to dislodge. Coke in COLAs. Bayer in aspirin. Disney in theme parks. Kleenex in tissues. Philadelphia in cream cheese. Webster in dictionaries. Pitney Bowes in postage metering. And Gillette in razor blades to name a few. These guys got into the mind first and their product itself becomes the icon of the category. As such, they are very difficult to dislodge as the leader.

In the old days you never even mentioned the competition. But again, positioning requires that you relate the product or issue to something that is already in the prospect’s mind–something with which they are familiar–and one way to do that is relate your product to the leader.

The most famous of the early positioning campaigns of this nature was the “against” position taken by Avis against Hertz. They wisely didn’t try to take Hertz head on, they said

“Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.”

Avis had lost money for 13 years in a row until they acknowledged that they were number 2 and as such would try harder. A masterful position. And they started making money immediately.

Trying to take the leader head on usually results in marketing suicide. When no less a company than RCA announced that they were going to take on IBM in computers in the 1970s, Robert Sarnoff said that he expected it would take them a year to get to be #2 in the computer industry. A year and $250 million dollars later RCA walked away with its tail between it legs.

Why? IBM had the computer position in the minds of the public. IBM meant computers. RCA meant radio, TV, records–they had the communication position in the public’s mind.
What If You’re Not First?

What if you’re not Disney or Gillette or CNN? Is there a way to take market share from a leader? The Avis example demonstrates that there is, and that is by finding a position that is available in the mind of your public.

“To find a unique position, what you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind. You won’t find an ‘uncola’ idea inside a 7-Up can. You find it inside the cola drinker’s head.” Said Trout and Reis.

Here are some unique positions, which carved out handsome market share for the products or services that were being marketed into categories already full of products.

VW took an immensely successful “small and ugly position” in the late 60s and early 70s (which you may have noticed, they have recently returned to after trying unsuccessfully to move out of the small position. VW means small car).

Virginia Slims created a distinguishing “gender position” in the cigarette market.

Budget Rent a Car has a “low cost or economy position” in rental cars; Circuit City has this position in retail electronics, Motel 6 has it in hospitality.

At the other end of the price spectrum, a few brands with a “top-of-the-line/luxury position” are; Rolls Royce in automobiles, Ritz Carlton or the Four Seasons in hospitality, Chivas Regal in scotch, and Sax Fifth Avenue in retail, Tiffanies in Jewelry, Mont Blanc in pens.

Head and Shoulders took a huge bite out of the shampoo market with the “anti dandruff” position.

The NASDQ has the technology position among stock exchanges.

Locations have positions (places in the mind). Entertainment = Hollywood; Family vacation = Orlando; Casinos and entertainment = Las Vegas (but a long standing and aggressive PR effort is working to change that position to a more family-oriented vacation destination).

So do people. Who do you think of when I say “Interest rates”? “Golf”? “Ice Hockey”? “Cuba”? To most, these names will instantly conjure up–Alan Greenspan, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretsky and Fidel Castro (sounds like a Manhattan law firm–Greenspan, Woods, Gretsky & Castro.)

But most products and services don’t have that kind of instant name recognition and are competing in or being introduced into very highly competitive marketing environments. More competitive by far than when Trout and Reis first wrote about the need for positioning. Indeed, a recent report published in Iconocast notes that by 2005 internet users will be besieged with 3,000 advertising messages every single day–about 1,000 on line and 2,000 off line. Assuming 16 hours a day of ears and eyeballs, that’s 3 ads a minute ALL DAY LONG. This gives one some idea of the challenge of finding a unique position for a product or service and then getting it communicated.

It takes the average person ¼ of a second to decide whether or not they are going to read your message or throw it in the trash (or turn the page). An ad must communicate instantly. If you look at an ad and don’t get a communication right now the advertiser has missed the boat. That doesn’t mean that at some point some people might not read it, but the large majority will pass it by and your marketing and advertising dollars will have been wasted or at the very least provide you with a meager return.
Narrowing the Focus

One of the ways to facilitate a strong position is accomplished by doing the opposite of what most marketers want to do. Most sales and marketing staff want to try to be all things to all people. This may provide some short-term benefit, but it clearly weakens the brand and the position in the long run. You strengthen your brand by narrowing your focus.

Some examples from Al Reis’ 22 Immutable Laws of Branding make the point.

Chevrolet used to be the number one selling car in America. It had a “reliable and reasonably priced” position. In 1986 they sold 1,718,839 cars. But expanding their line and trying to be all things to all people undermined the power of the brand. Chevys are all over the spectrum today with countless sub-brands and now they sell less than a million cars a year. They have fallen to second place behind Ford.

In 1988 American Express offered a few credit cards and had the position as the prestige credit card and 27 percent of the market. Then it expanded its product line–a senior card, student card, membership miles card, Optima card, Optima Rewards card, Optima True Grace card, and the Purchasing card–and on it went. Today American Express has 18% of the market.

In the mid 90s, Levi Strauss had 31 percent of the blue jean market. Then, in an effort to appeal to a wider market, they introduced a number different styles and options–baggy, zippered, wide-leg and so on. Today they have 19 percent of the market.

Now what happens when the focus is narrowed?

Delicatessen shops have a history of selling “everything”. Fred DeLuca narrowed the focus to one type of sandwich–submarine. Subway has grown to be a huge success–the eighth largest fast-food chain in America with 13,000 units worldwide.

“Coffee shops” used to have extensive food menus; Starbucks narrowed the focus to coffee.

The Children’s Supermart used to sell all kinds of children’s furniture and toys. They wanted to grow. They narrowed their focus and changed their name. Toys R Us now sells 20% of the toys in the US.

Other examples of this kind of focused positioning include; The Gap = everyday causal clothing, Home Depot = home supplies, Victoria’s Secret = ladies’ lingerie, PetsMart = pet supplies, Blockbuster Video = video rentals, Foot Locker= athletic shoes, Office Depot = office supplies.
Product Positioning Surveys

Finding an exact position for a product or service is done by conducting surveys of a company’s customers and prospects. Fortunately, L Ron Hubbard’s research of the subject lead him to develop highly precise survey techniques that enable one to find a position for a product or service that will communicate instantly to a particular public–a wonderful tool for those of us who are in the business of communicating to people about products, services and ideas.

Positioning lets you create a place for your product in the mind of your prospect. Without it, your marketing, advertising and Public Relations dollars are at risk. With it, the sky’s the limit.

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