Positioning Your Internet Business, Part I

Positioning,: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout is one of the best business books I've ever read.  I'd put it on the same shelf with Good to Great, Built to Last, The Seven Day Weekend and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.

After nearly 10 years in business, it's time for us to do some more formal thinking about positioning, so I'll discuss this book in detail.  It's a critical activity for us since we're launching new businesses in a hyper competitive Internet environment.

So, what's positioning and why is it necessary?  Here's the argument (unedited but formatting and paragraph ordering is mine): 

The overcommunicated society.

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

The product explosion.

Take drugs. There are some 100,000 prescription drugs on the U.S. market. While many of these are specialized and used almost exclusively by medical specialists, the general practitioner still has a Herculean job to keep informed about the multitude of drug products available. Herculean? No, it’s an impossible job. Even Hercules himself could not have kept up with more than a small fraction of these drugs. To expect more is to be totally ignorant of the finite capacity of even the most brilliant mind.

The oversimplified message.

The best approach to take in our overcommunicated society is the oversimplified message. It’s a selection project. You have to select the material that has the best chance of getting through.

But what about truth? What about the facts of the situation? What is truth? What is objective reality? By turning the process around, by focusing on the prospect rather than the product, you simplify the selection process.

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

Once a mind is made up, it's almost impossible to change it.

The average person will sit still when being told something which he or she knows nothing about.  (Which is why "news" is an effective advertising approach".)

It's a selection project.  You have to select the material that has the best chance of getting through.

For a job board, it means this - even if there aren't really 40,000 useful job boards out there, as the experts might lead you to believe,  there are still far too many from a prospect's point of view!  Not only that, but the job board is just one of many categories of website.  The number of domains the prospect has to remember may include dating, banking, education, news, local, shopping, etc... 

You could even imagine that your prospects may be incapable of recalling your job board's name even when they try.  In this instance positioning could take on a more physical meaning -- the positioning of links everywhere a prospect is likely to hunt, so that all roads lead to your job board.

But let's stick with the positioning we can accomplish with our marketing messages and the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.  According to the authors, our job is to pierce through the clutter with marketing or messaging that resonates so well with the prospects existing thoughts, that the message becomes memorable and meaningful. 

Continue with Positioning Your Internet Business, Part II