What Positioning Is All About?

What positioning is all about?

Today the market place is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There are just too many products, two many companies, and too much marketing.

The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to influence what's already up there in the mind, to rebind the connections that already exist.

The over communicated society

In an over communicated society, to talk about the "impact" of advertising is to seriously overstate the potential effectiveness of the message.

In the communication jungle, only hope to achieve big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word positioning.

The Oversimplified mind

The only defense a person has in our overcommuinicated society is an oversimplified mind. The average mind always a dripping sponge that can only soak up more information at the expense of what's already there. Yet we pour more information into that supersaturated sponge and are disappointed when our message fails to get through. Not unless people cancel the law of nature that gives us only 24 in a day will they find a way to stuff more in to the mind.

The Oversimplified messages

The best approach to take in our over communicated society is the oversimplified messages.

In communication, as in architecture, less is more. You have to sharpen your message to cut into the mind. You have to discard the ambiguities, simplify the message, and then simplify it some more if you want to make a long lasting impression.

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 perception of the prospect. Not the reality of the product.

The transmission traffic jam

There are so many ways of receiving information. eg News papers, advertising, TV channels etc. Who reads sees or listens to all this outpouring of communication. There is a traffic jam on the turnpikes of the mind. Engines are overheating. Tempers are rising.

The media explosion

Another reason your messages keep getting lost is the number of media we have invented to serve our communication. There is television, commercial, cable. There is radio. AM and FM. There is outdoor. Posters and billboards. There are news papers. Morning, evening, daily, weekly and Sunday. Do you know 15 times as much about the products you buy? You may be exposed to much more advertising, but your mind can't absorb anymore than it used to. There is a finite limit to hoe much you can take in.

The product explosion

Another reason our messages keep getting lost is the number of products we have invented to take care of our physical and mental needs.

Hoe does the average person cope with the product and the media explosion? Studies on the sensitivity of the human brain have established the existence of the fact called "sensory overload". Scientists have discovered that a person is capable of receiving only a limited amount of sensation.

The advertising explosion

Ironically (happening in the opposite way to what is expected) as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up. Not just in volume, but in the number of users.

Doctors, lawyers,