Positioning

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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.


Research Methods For Positioning

The first problem is “who do you
talk to” to learn about positioning,
or repositioning, a brand. At the
beginning, it’s very important to talk
to consumers representing a broad
spectrum of the potential market. It
is in these early stages that you must
resist the temptation to focus in too
quickly on a narrow segment of consumers.
Keep the market definitions
very broad in the early stages of the
research, so that you do not accidentally
preordain the outcome before
it even begins.