Positioning Your Internet Business, Part III

This is a continuation of my review of the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout.  Here are more passages I found meaningful.

You need vision.
You must have vision. There’s no sense building a position based on a technology that’s too narrow. Or a product that’s becoming obsolete. Or a name that’s defective.

Be patient. The sun shines tomorrow on those who have made the right decisions today.
If a company has positioned itself in the right direction, it will be able to ride the currents of change, ready to take advantage of those opportunities that are right for it. But when an opportunity arrives, a company must move quickly.

You must have some intuitions about the future that are not commonly shared by others.  If you can't see the future in a way that others don't, you're probably too late to the party, someone else has already built a company occupying the market position you want.

You need courage.
When you trace the history of how leadership positions were established, from Hershey in chocolate to Hertz in rent-a-cars, the common thread is not marketing skill or even product innovation. The common thread is seizing the initiative before the competitor has a chance to get established. The leader usually poured in the marketing money while the situation was still fluid.

I remember launching  the first bilingual and Hispanic jobs site in 1997 thinking how foolish I'd look if I failed.  I had already told everyone I knew what I was doing and there was no turning around.  It does take courage and being the first WAS very helpful.  

You need objectivity.
To be successful in the positioning era, you must be brutally frank. You must try to eliminate all ego from the decision-making process. It only clouds the issue.

Like Ping-Pong, positioning is a game best played by two people. It’s no accident that this book was written by two people. Only in a give-and-take atmosphere can ideas be refined and perfected.

Objectivity is a terribly difficult thing to find for an entrepreneur and it's one of the things that makes EO so valuable to us.  Whenever big decisions need to be made, I have 7 other entrepreneurs to hear me out.  It was in an EO meeting that I decided to be agressive with our new Diversity Jobs project. 

What you don’t need.
To repeat, the first rule of positioning is: To win the battle for the mind, you can’t compete head-on against a company that has a strong, established position. You can go around, under or over, but never head to head.

The leader owns the high ground. The No. 1 position in the prospect’s mind. The top rung of the product ladder. To move up the ladder, you must follow the rules of positioning.

In our overcommunicated society, the name of the game today is positioning.

This is really a tremendously interesting statement in view of the Internet - there are so many great websites out there.  Add 1000 times as many good websites.  Add 10,000 times as many mediocre websites.  Think about 40,000 employment websites... it's just too much.  So how do you respond? What's good positioning in this hyper-congested marketplace?  Who's got good positioning?

Part I, Part II