to conceptualize markets as distant abstractions - battlefields, targets, demographics - and the Net as simply another conduit down which companies can broadcast messages. But the Net isn't a conduit, a pipeline or another television channel. The Net invites your customers in to talk, to laugh with each other and to learn from each other. Connected, they reclaim their voice in the market, but now with more reach and wider influence.
ASSUME THE POSITION
Public relations, advertising and marketing communications all reflect the company's "position." Positioning is darned important, then - strategic, even. And if you're a marketing consultant, positioning is where the big bucks are. You're right there at the top of the marketing totem pole.
Positioning is not only lucrative for its practitioners, it's also fun since it's usually done on a blank piece of paper. "Who do we want to be?" asks the positioning expert. "Are we the maker of the world's finest timepieces? No, maybe we're the people who keep business on time. Ooh, maybe we're the company that's making punctuality into a fashion accessory!" Undoubtedly, someone will trump these suggestions by saying, "We're not really about watches at all," and then, in a solemn voice: "We're the Time Company."
Often, "positioning exercises" become expensive sojourns into corporate psychology. The consultant gets to spend time with one group leader after another, performing the role of corporate shrink.
The resulting data is impossible to connect, but that doesn't matter, because the goal is only to come up with a "statement." And all that statement has to be is marginally different from every other company's faked-up statement. Never mind that nobody in the marketplace cares about any company's positioning statement. It matters only that this statement will drive the strategy, which will be yet another advertising and PR bombing campaign.
Can it get even more arrogant? Indeed, it actually can.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE Positioning wasn't even an issue until 1972, when Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote a series of articles for Advertising Age and then authored one of the top-selling business books of all time, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. The goal of positioning, Trout says, is to own one word in your customer's mind. For evidence, you don't even need to leave your own skull.
Take a look: You'll find FedEx in the "overnight" position, Crest in the "cavities" position and Volvo in the "safety" position, even if you have never bought those products. In the battlefield of your mind, those companies are entrenched in those positions.
Why one word? Because to Trout and Ries, the human mind is as closed as a clam and just as roomy. Witness Jack Trout's Five Basic Principles of the Mind, from his 1997 sequel, The New Positioning:
1. Minds are limited.
2. Minds hate confusion.
3. Minds are insecure.
4. Minds don't change.
5. Minds lose focus.
In short, minds are so pathetic that they desperately need help, even if it comes in the form of an axe. That's what positioning is about.
Too bad, because positioning is about something much more important, something that gets trivialized by those who reduce it to generating a catchy tag line. Positioning is about discovering who you, as a business, are - discovering your identity, not inventing a new one willy-nilly. Positioning should help a company become what it is, not something it's not (no matter how cool it would be).
A company can certainly try to be what it's not. But the market conversation will expose the fakery. One clue is any attempt by a company to deny its history, because history is one of those things that can't be changed. General Motors (GM) will always be the product of Alfred Sloan's preference for implementation over innovation; Apple (AOIXQ) will always be the product of Steve Jobs' artistic temperament; Hewlett-Packard (HWP) will always be the product of its founders' obsession with quality products for niche technical
