Promotion Strategy

How did a hard-sell concept like positioning become so popular in a business noted for its creativity?

In truth, the past decade might well be characterized as a "return to reality:.White knights and black eyes patches gave way to such positioning concepts as Lite Beer's "Everything you've always wanted in a great beer. And less"

Poetic? Yes. Artful? Yes. But also a straightforward, clearly defined explanation of the basic positioning premise.

To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the reality that really counts is what's already in the prospect's mind.

To be creative, to create something that doesn't already exist in the mind, is becoming more and more difficult. If not impossible.

The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different. But to manipulate what's already up there in the mind. To retie the connections that already exist.

Today's marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.

The question most frequently asked is why. Why do we need a new approach to advertising and marketing?

(We had no idea what "too many" really meant. Average supermarket now has 40.000 SKUs or Stock Keeping Units).

The Overcommunicated Society

The answer is that we have become and overcommunicated society. The per-capita consumption of advertising in America today is about $200 a year.

(The $200 per capita figure was based on a broad definition of advertising. If you count "media expenditures" only the actual 1972 number was about $110 per person. Today the comparable number is $880. Truly we live in an over-communicated society and it's not getting any better).

If you spend $1 million in a year on advertising, you are bombarding in the average consumer with less than a half-cent of advertising, spread out over 365 days. A consumer already exposed to $200 worth of advertising from other companies.

In our overcommunicated society, to talk about the impact of your advertising is to seriously overstate the potential effectiveness of your message.it's an egocentric view that bears no relationship to the realities of the marketplace.

In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, "Positioning".

The mind, as a defense against the volume of today's communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.

Million of dollars have been wasted trying to change minds with advertising. Once a mind is made up, it's almost impossible to change it. Certainly not with a weak force like advertising. "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up." That's a way of life for most people.

The average person can tolerate being told something which he or she knows nothing about. (Which is why "news" is an effective advertising approach). But the average person cannot tolerate being told he or she is wrong. Mind-changing is the road to advertising disaster.

(The folly of trying to change a human mind became one of the most important tenets of the positioning concept. This is the one principle most often violated by marketing people. Literally millions of dollars are wasted every day by companies trying to change the minds of their prospects).

The Oversimplified Mind

The only defense a person has in our overcommunicated society is an oversimplified mind.

Not unless they repeal the law of nature that gives us only 24 hours in a day will they find a way to stuff more into the mind.

The average mind is already a dripping sponge that can only soak up more information at the expense of what's already there. Yet we continue to pour more information into that supersaturated sponge and are disappointed when our messages fail to get through.

Advertising, of course, is only the tip of the communication iceberg. We communicate with each other in a wide variety of bewildering ways. And in a geometrically increasing volume.

The medium may not be the message, but it does seriously affect the message. Instead of a transmission system, the medium acts like a filter. Only a tiny fraction of the original materials ends up in the mind of the receiver.

Furthermore, what we receive in influenced by the nature of our overcommunicated society. "Glittering generalites" have become a way of life in our overcommunicated society. Not to mention that they work.

Technically, we are capable of increasing the volume of communication at least tenfold. Already there's talk