Jack Trout’s Brand Positioning Technique

In the seventies, Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote many articles on brand positioning. Years later, the logic of their thinking still holds true. Positioning is a weighty concept. It is NOT a concept to be bandied around casually – research, analysis and sensible thinking are as important as well.

In any case, here are some elements of the Jack Trout articles  that I found captivating:

Your Mind’s Brand Limit: SEVEN

Your memory’s limitations :

Your mind has limited storage capacity. Period.  There are more than 500,000 trademarks registered with the U.S. Patent Office. In addition, untold thousands of unregistered trademarks are in use throughout the country.

In the course of a single year, the average mind is exposed to more than half a million advertising messages. ( My comment: These messages emanate from a variety of sources including television, radio, the internet – email, social media, websites, videos, phones – texts, videos, mobile Internet, direct mail, billboards, word-of-mouth campaigns etc)

What we can absorb:

The target (i.e. simple folks like you and me) of all this communication has a reading vocabulary of no more than 25,000 to 50,000 words, and a speaking vocabulary of one-fifth as much.

The average human mind, according to Harvard psychologist George A. Miller, cannot deal with more than seven units at a time. (The eighth company in a given field is out of luck.)

Ask someone to name all the brands he or she remembers in a given product category. Rarely will anyone name more than seven. And that’s for a high-interest category. For low-interest products, the average consumer can usually name no more than one or two brands. Yet in category after category, the number of individual brands multiply like rabbits. In 1964, there were seven soft drinks advertised on network television. Today there are 22.

To cope with complexity, people have learned to reduce everything to its utmost simplicity. When asked to describe an offspring’s intellectual progress, a person doesn’t usually quote vocabulary statistics, reading comprehension, mathematical ability, etc. “He’s in seventh grade” is a typical reply. This “ranking” of people, objects and brands is not only a convenient method of organizing things, but also an absolute necessity if a person is to keep from being overwhelmed by the complexities of life.

You see ranking concepts at work among movies, restaurants, business and military organizations. (According to Jack Trout, some day,  someone might even come up with a rating system for politicians.)

The Mind Is a Memory Bank
To better understand what an advertiser is up against, it may be helpful to take a closer look at the objective of all advertising programs – the human mind.

Like a memory bank, the mind has a slot or “position” for each bit of information it has chosen to retain. In operation, the mind is a lot like a computer. But, there is one important difference. A computer has to accept what is put into it. The mind does not. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

The mind, as a defense mechanism against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that new information which matches its prior knowledge or experience. It filters out everything else. For example, when a viewer sees a television commercial that says, “Sony means computers,” he doesn’t accept it. HP or Dell means computers. Sony means electronics or Playstation 2.

The computer “position” in the minds of most people is filled by companies called Hewlett Packard or Dell or Gateway. For a competitive computer manufacturer to obtain a favorable position in the prospect’s mind, he must somehow relate his company to HP’s position. Yet, too many companies embark on marketing and advertising programs as if the competitor’s position did not exist. They advertise their products in a vacuum and are disappointed when their messages fail to get through.