How Brand Positioning Has (and Hasn’t) Changed in 60 Years
Misunderstood
It’s important to first point out that brand positioning, like most academic marketing principles, is still not well understood. It’s often mistaken for a tagline (a recurring creative brand message), a value proposition (a succinct phrasing of the brand’s key benefit or promise), a brand belief, a mission statement, or something else.
So, let’s start with a very basic definition: brand positioning is the attempt at specifying a brand’s position in the market and what that should mean in the minds of its audience.
(It’s also the most important marketing concept in history.)
Now that we have that settled, let’s take a trip back in time.
A Moment in History
The year is 1960-something. Al Ries, founder of the New York ad agency Ries Cappiello Colwell, has an idea. Most advertising at the time consisted of brands trying to look cool and act like they were the best around. Competition, especially amongst big brands, was centered on ad agencies trying to come up with a tagline, design, jingle, or story that stole the show. But Al thought that strategy could only work for so long. He thought every brand needed a credible idea that audiences couldn’t dispute; an idea that could be inextricably connected with your brand; an idea that could fill a vacant position in the mind of your audience. He called this idea, “the rock.” Luckily, he ran the idea by one of his trusted account executives, Jack Trout, who said to name it “position” instead. A few years later in 1972, Al and Jack wrote a series of articles that took the ad industry by storm, and the positioning era was born. Though, there were some growing pains.
Initially, positioning was highly controversial. Al and Jack took a strong stance against “rampant creativity.” They said that creativity that doesn’t position the product “no longer serves a purpose.” The ad agency establishment took offense, and most in the industry saw it as a threat to their way of doing business — their way of life. It took nearly 10 years of published debate, international speeches, some proof-of-concept campaigns, and a best-selling book before positioning took hold and took off.
A Statement and a Template
Fast-forward another decade, and positioning took its next big leap with a different best-selling author. Dr. Geoffrey Moore was an English professor in Michigan who decided to become a tech consultant. This unusual career move gave him an interesting perspective on what drove innovation as well as what motivated people. Working in the tech industry, he noticed the difficulties visionary entrepreneurs had connecting their products to the right audience. In 1991, he wrote Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. The book was a game-changer for the tech industry but also for the marketing industry, as one of the chapters included a template for codifying a product’s positioning:
For [target customers] who [statement of need or opportunity], the [product name] is a [product category] that [statement of key benefit / compelling reason to buy]. Unlike [primary competitive alternative], our product [statement of primary differentiation].
This fill-in-the-blank formula was known far and wide as a positioning statement and became the method for crafting brand positioning. It was utilized by brands, ad agencies, and consultancies all over the globe. It turned Al and Jack’s revolutionary brainchild into a replicable system that could (and would) be taught in classrooms and added to textbooks.
Geoffrey Moore never worked with Al Ries. In fact, there’s no evidence the two ever even met. But there is a clear throughline between them. Al and Jack taught us that brands need to find and occupy a position in the minds of their audience. Dr. Moore took that one step further, saying that for positioning to be effective, it needed to narrow and specify that audience. And then he created a step-by-step template for doing just that.
Today, there are dozens of iterations of this template.
How Much and How Little Things Have Changed
Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the kind of advertising that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, too much marketing “noise.” We’re an over-communicated society. Each day, thousands of messages compete for a share of the prospect’s mind. While no one doubts the advertiser’s financial ability to dish it out, there’s some question about the consumer’s mental ability to take it all in.
That was written in 1972.
It’s incredible to think that positioning was created to help solve the problem of too much marketing and too many me-too products — nearly 60 years ago! All these years later, audiences feel much more of the same.
That over-communicated society now includes smartphones, social media, streaming, email, and, oh yeah, the Internet. We are smack-dab in the middle of The Inundation Age: a time when attention spans have never been shorter and content creation has never been more prevalent. There’s likely more content online than we will ever have time to consume. It would take you 82 years just to watch the videos uploaded to YouTube in the last 24 hours.
The introduction of generative AI hasn’t helped this equation. It’s made it worse. Creating new online content has gotten faster and easier than ever before, and marketers have noticed. It’s estimated that nearly half of all new (English-language) online articles are now AI-generated. We’ve met the new boss, and in many ways, it’s the same as the old boss.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
There’s no denying that brand positioning is still as essential as it was in the days of Al and Jack. Applying it effectively, however, has gotten a lot trickier. There’s more uncertainty now. How do you create unique positions for brands in an era where there is too much of everything? How can a brand fill a vacant position in a mind that has no vacancies? Will AI be a useful tool in this cause or an existential threat against it?
At Adcetera, we love thinking about these types of questions. What we love even more is putting theory into practice by solving positioning problems on the ground for our clients. We like to say, “the more impossible, the more fun.” Think you’ve got a positioning challenge to put us to the test? Reach out.