Summary: The New Positioning

Review and Analysis of Trout and Rivkin's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782511016718
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin's book: `The New Positioning: The Latest on the World's #1 Business Strategy`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin's book `The New Positioning` shows that `positioning` means to concentrate on an idea that defines the company and its products in the minds of consumers, and to avoid the temptation to try and be all things to everybody. In their book, the authors explain that a company that is positioned will select an attribute that appeals to the marketplace and align everything it does behind delivering in that area. Over time, the consumer will begin to mentally associate that company with the attribute whenever that product is mentioned. This summary will teach you how to position your company so that you can gain a strong competitive advantage and be on your way to becoming the top-of-mind brand.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Understand key concepts
• Expand your knowledge

To learn more, read `The New Positioning` and discover the key to positioning your company and gaining an edge in the marketplace.

Summary of The New Positioning (Jack Trout & Steve Rivkin)

Part 1
The Theory of Positioning

Main Idea

Positioning is a game businesses play in a crowded marketplace to make their product stand out from everyone else’s products.

Positioning is played not in the marketplace but in the mind of the consumer. The most important facts to remind yourself about the positioning process are:

1. Minds are limited in the amount of data they can process.
2. Minds hate confusion or complexity and love simplicity.
3. Minds are insecure – emotional rather than rational.
4. Minds don’t change, so reclaiming an old idea works.
5. Minds can lose focus, so never try line extensions.

Supporting Ideas

Over communication is a fact of life in the late 1990s. There is now more information available than at any other time in history, and new information is flooding into the marketplace. The only problem is that instead of making people smarter, all that information makes them more confused.

With that in mind, the following facts about the mental process are directly relevant to positioning:

Fact #1. Minds are limited.

Marketers love to sit down and craft long, detailed rationales for why a person will benefit from buying their product or service. The only problem is that when they try and present this material to consumers, these potential customers filter it out as noise that should be ignored rather than something important.

There is a big difference between data and information:

• Data are “chunks” or “packets” of facts and ideas, without context or structure.
• Information leads to understanding.

If it makes sense to the consumer, it is information – otherwise, it’s just data – and there’s plenty of that around..

With over communication, people have become highly selective about what information they absorb. Most people have a selective filter mechanism to determine:

1. What type of information they expose themselves to.
2. Whether to pay attention to whatever they take in.
3. Whether or not to retain or act on what they see or hear.

Then, once information has been gained, its impact on future actions will be dependent on:

1. How interesting your product is.
2. How emotionally involved people become.
3. The consumer’s past experiences.

In fact, the best formats for communicating marketing messages turn out to be:

1. Analogies – connect new information with past experiences.
2. A news format – because people are conditioned that way.

Fact #2. Minds hate confusion.

People love simple solutions to complex problems. Therefore, the best marketers don’t try and tell their entire story – that just creates confusion. Instead, they focus on just one single attribute and drive that single message home.

Successful products in the marketplace make good sense. They invariably solve a problem in a simple way. Therefore, the best way to describe them is usually always to oversimplify – to come up with an obvious way to describe them. Develop that and you’re going to stand out in the clutter and noise of the marketplace like a beacon.

Fact #3. Minds are insecure.

When it comes right down to it, people will always make a buying decision based on their emotions rather than on logic. That’s because most people feel a little insecure, and really don’t know how to find the best choice in any product category.

Therefore, telling them they have a choice won’t help. To offset that insecurity, you create a “bandwagon” – an increasing collection of people who have made the right choice. You get people to join the bandwagon by using endorsements or testimonials, either from influential people or consumers who were in the same state of confusion the prospect is in.

More often than not, people buy what they think they should have or what they are emotionally attracted to rather than what they need. Smart marketers address this insecurity by creating a peer group of people who have made one particular decision, or by invoking the heritage and tradition of a product to illustrate that other consumers have been buying this product successfully for years and years – therefore, it’s quite safe.

Fact #4. Minds don’t change.

Most marketers expect advertising for a “new” product to generate far more excitement than advertising for something well know and established. In the marketplace, however, the opposite turns out to be true – people tend to be more impressed by what ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of The New Positioning (Jack Trout & Steve Rivkin)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright