Positioning

**Author:** Al Ries

**Estimated Reading Time:** 48 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

* Why the most important marketing battles happen inside the human mind, not in the marketplace * How to create a clear, defensible position for any product, service, company, or career * Why being first is the most powerful positioning strategy available * How to reposition competitors without making false claims * Why line extension destroys more brands than it saves * How to apply positioning principles to your own life and work

**Who This Book Is For:**

Entrepreneurs launching new products, marketers struggling to break through the noise, executives making brand strategy decisions, and anyone who wants to understand why some ideas stick in the mind while others vanish without a trace.

The central idea of this book is deceptively simple: positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. This single sentence contains a profound shift in perspective. For most of marketing history, the focus was on the product itself. Companies worked to make their products better, faster, cheaper, more feature-rich. They believed that if they built a superior product, the market would recognize that superiority and reward them with sales. Positioning turns this assumption on its head. It says that the product itself matters less than how the product is perceived. The battle is not fought in the factory or the laboratory. It is fought in the six inches of gray matter between the consumer's ears. This matters because the mind is not a blank slate. It is not a camera that faithfully records reality. It is a highly selective filter that admits some information and rejects most of it. It is a filing system that organizes information into categories and ranks. It is a defense mechanism that protects existing beliefs from contradictory evidence. When you understand how the mind works, you understand why positioning is necessary. The mind cannot process all the information it receives. So it simplifies. It creates categories. It ranks brands within those categories. It assigns each brand a position. Once a position is established, it is extraordinarily difficult to change. The mind resists information that contradicts what it already believes. If you try to tell consumers that your brand is something different from what they already think, they will simply reject your message. This is why the goal of positioning is not to change the mind. It is to work with the mind's existing structure. Find a space that is not already occupied. Find a position that fits with what the consumer already knows and believes. Then occupy that position and defend it. The most powerful way to do this…