It’s Your Positioning Strategy, Stupid! - Part 1

If you are in the marketing field, you should be no stranger to the word Positioning.

Al Ries and Jack Trout popularized the word “Positioning” in their popular bestselling book “Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind” many years back and it is still a must read for everyone interested in marketing today.

Positioning is the perception that occurs in the minds of your target market. It is the aggregate perception the market has of a particular company, product, service or person in relation to their perceptions of the competitors in the same category.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this, can you quickly name the mobile phone brands that come to your mind in 10 seconds?

1 second …

2 seconds…

5 seconds…

Ok STOP…

Depending on where you are from, major brand names like Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and o2 would probably come to your mind. Ok maybe other brands, these were the ones that came to my mind. (o2 because I use an o2 mini)

But are these the only brand names that you know or heard of? Absolutely not! Dig deeper into your memory. I’m sure that with a bit of work you will be able is list out more mobile phone brands.

What I was trying to illustrate is Top of Mind recall aka Mind share.

Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something. It can also refer to the development of consumer awareness about a specific product or brand in hopes that they will buy the product or brand.

When people think of examples of a type or category of product, they think of a limited list. For example, if one is considering purchasing a mobile phone, one has tens of different mobile phone brands to choose from. However those that are entrenched within the top of mind recall. I.e. those that are actually considered, will probably be limited to about five. Of these five, the mobile phone brands that one is most familiar with will have the greatest proportion of one’s mind share.

So the million dollar question at hand is “Why do I need to know this? How is this important?” In many ways actually…

For those of you with online businesses or any business for the matter, you can adopt positioning strategies for

1. Your Personal Brand (Yes you are a brand!)
2. Your website (s)
3. Your product (s)

Hence allowing you to cut through the clutter and establish mind share for your brand name, websites or products. And this holds true more importantly so if your business model caters to customers online.

Whilst you are promoting yourself, your websites and products to a global audience and have a bigger reach than the average brick and mortar business. You must understand too that internet users are becoming more trigger happy with their mouse clicks.

Whoop BANG and they are off viewing another website. What’s that website again? Alvinwho.com? They just cannot remember. Your positioning strategy has to stand for something that is of value to them. And of course it has to have that edge or difference over the authority leaders in your particular field.

If you are anything like me, I would guess you probably have thousands of bookmarks in your web browser. Which you tell yourself you will visit when you have the time.

FACT : You visit at most 30% of your bookmarks ever again.

But you might have a couple (10 – 20 maybe) of bookmarks of the few websites that you place in a special folder that you know you CANNOT AFFORD not to visit. Or maybe your memory is much stronger and you store these websites at the back of your mind.

So here it is…these 10-20 websites/ personal blogs / product pages /portals /news are the elite few that have gained your mind share. The rest…will be lucky if you visit them ever again.

Now that I have whetted your appetite…

I will be covering the DOs and DON’Ts of positioning your personal brandname to attract maximum attention and stand out from the crowd in the next series of “It’s Your Positioning Strategy, Stupid”. So stay tuned and pray I don’t get lazy…

In the meantime…you should

Click here to Download The Strategic Domination White Paper for FREE

It reveals the strategy that any business owner, online or offline should be adopting to maximize profits in the shortest time possible. All of us have limited resources, and we owe it to ourselves to only concentrate on the areas which yield the highest profit.

Lastly, the beauty of it all is that the concept is universal and applicable to every business owner. You have to face the million dollar question now, “Do you have a strategy or are you just waiting for that lucky break?”

Click here to Download The Strategic Domination White Paper for FREE

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