“Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
-- 20th Anniversary Edition”
By Al Ries and Jack Trout
McGraw-Hill, 2001
There are books that acquire the status of a “classic”. And once a book is conferred such an honor, it occupies a special place in your bookshelf. There are actually two sides to a timeless classic:
One, it preserves yesterday’s occurrence so major or an idea so earthshaking then, and serves as an interesting study on how people lived or thought then. We look back and say, wistfully even, “O, that’s how it was.” It’s history for the scholar and the curious.
Two, it keeps a watershed event or a groundbreaking idea all happening in the past that somehow, as representative of a period, can be retrieved later – today or tomorrow -- to shed light on current happenings. It is history explaining contemporary or future events or ideas.
The book, “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind – Twentieth Anniversary Edition,” published 20 years ago, is a classic belonging to the second category. The book was an event that revolutionized advertising and marketing strategic thought. It was also an idea whose “time had come” two decades ago, to paraphrase Victor Hugo.
It’s the same idea -- “positioning” -- that “is even more important today,” say the publishers. Is it a case of “retrieving” a relic from the dusty shelf, refurbish it, and thus pass it off as fresh as it was 20 years ago?
Or is it a case of a “formula” that continues to work wonders, a potion that hasn’t lost its magic, a time-tested (not time-worn) strategy that gets results, or an idea that always comes as “fresh from the oven.”
Re-reading is normally a chore – if not a bore. You feel you are short-changing yourself. I was prepared for the worst when I took hold of this book – after I was attracted by its 20th anniversary edition cover. It turns out that the book offers more than just a re-run of what I have read, yes, about 12 years ago.
It has come fresh for two reasons: One, the authors give a running commentary on what they wrote much earlier – thus illuminating the past with the present and vice versa. Two, the commentaries are easy to spot since they are placed on wide margins, with (many times) matching illustrations, to boot.
On media explosion, for example. The old version spoke only of television, print, and radio. At the margin is the familiar logo of “America Online” with the note: “Add the internet to the media list. The Internet, in our opinion, will become the greatest of all media with the most impact on our lives.” This is the book updating itself!
In the old version, the authors said that line extension for General Motors (makers of Cadillac) was ill- advised. In this newly-minted book, the same authors – much wiser – admitted: “We were wrong about the Cadillac Seville. It’s still with us.” This is the book correcting itself.
While Ries and Trout were wrong about the Cadillac, they took an “I-told-you-so” posture on the Volkswagen. They said then that it was a “terrible strategy” for Volkswagen to extend its product lines beyond the Beetle – despite the cute headline: “Different Volks for different folks.” “In 1993,” the new book says, “their (Volkswagen’s) share was less than three percent. Recently, of course, they brought back the Beetle and sales soared.”
There are many things that change. There are a few things that are unchanging. The authors did not revise their definition of “positioning”: “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.” And the entire book, with 22 chapters, guide you once again to becoming successful with “positioning.”
When you do decide to revisit the “Positioning” idea, especially when you are interested to position a company, not a product, page 159 narrates how Monsanto came up with a positioning idea that gave it pre-eminence as an industry leader in chemicals.
Revisiting a book – like a place – sometimes gives you a new eye for details that you missed the first time. I overlooked some interesting points when I read the old book – in the section titled “Make Sure Your Name Is Right.” Who is Leonard Slye? Who was Marion Morrison? Who was Issur Danielovitch? They are, in that order, Roy Rogers, John Wayne and Kirk Douglas! The message was clear then and clear now. Change your product or corporate name if they are forgettable – or are tongue twisters.
Reading the book the second time around, if only for the marginal notes, illuminates both the present and the past. “Positioning” as a marketing and creative approach remains effective today – alongside David Ogilvy’s “unique selling proposition” and “The Big Idea.”
If you haven’t read the book you have the advantage of knowing what works and what hasn’t work in a two-decade stretch. If you’ve read the 20-years-ago edition, this latest one is “Positioning Revisited.” It’s viewing this durable concept with a new lens.
Sunday, July 21, 2002
Sunday, July 14, 2002
Kotler, et al, help marketers sense, thrive in new economy
“Marketing Moves”
By Philip Kotler, Dipak Jain & Suvit Maesingee
Harvard Business School Press, 2002
When mindset-altering changes hit us — scientific, business or mathematical — we, like a groggy boxer hit by a whammy, ask: “Wha’ happened?”
When Copernicus declared that the sun is the center of the universe, not the earth, that revolutionary statement rocked the scientific and theological foundations of the leaders of his time. When, after circumnavigating the world, the voyager said that the earth is round, not flat, everyone was confused and scholars went back to their drawing boards and threw away all studies that proceeded from a false premise.
When many scholars and businessmen declared that the “new economy” is upon us — driven by the information revolution — many wondered what happened, others wandered around in the “new wilderness” confused as ever, still many others unable to cope with dramatic changes went bankrupt — and the majority of us ask: “What is really happening?”
Many books have been written on the “new” economy, on “customer-driven” firms, on the meteorically rising and falling dot-coms, and on the baffling digital world. Many of these have been useful, giving us as they do, an understanding of one facet of such economy, or one astonishing aspect of such phenomenon. Thus, we sigh that, somehow, we can make sense out of this “new thing.”
But, it takes Philip Kotler, the marketing guru and principal author of “Marketing Moves” to make the “new economy” in its variegated forms understandable to many of us. Trust Kotler to spot previous concepts and say that they no longer hold true. For example, he juxtaposes two contrasting laws:
“Company growth in the industrial age was limited by the operation of the law of diminishing returns… (but) growth in the new economy is governed by self-reinforcing cycles. Consider Metcalfe’s law: The cost of the network expands linearly with increase in network size, but the value of the network increases exponentially.”
The above is just one of the nine “major shifts toward the digital economy,” which are discussed at length with a lot of insights in the book. You will be shocked to know that the phrases we used just yesterday have been thrown out of the window by Kotler and his team. For example, one other major movement is the shift “from corporate governance to market governance.” Just the other day, a seminar on corporate governance was held as if it was a newfound concept. Talking of keeping abreast of what is “in” and what is “out,” this book gives you a leading edge.
The book will not only make you fashionable and ahead of the rest. In fact, the more important contribution of this book is the way it has organized the new manifestations of the “digital economy” into bite-size clusters, making you able to relate otherwise separate developments.
The book says that marketing should not be the function of the marketing department alone — and that’s not new. What’s groundbreaking, though, is the authors’ construction of the “Holistic Marketing Framework” — which combines three important concerns — Customer Focus, Core Competencies and Collaborative Network.
At first glance, that doesn’t seem new either, until the authors show how market offerings, marketing activities, business architecture, and operational system all work together to drive corporate and business strategies that lead to profitability and shareholder value. Well, that’s a mouthful – but it is such because it delivers in a capsule how a company thrives in the digital economy.
Gird up for studying every “competitive platform” as prescribed by the guru himself. This book is not as thick as “Marketing Management,” authored by Kotler also and published two decades ago. (That’s our textbook at Asia’s premier graduate business school in the early eighties.) Has Kotler reinvented himself? Is he now saying that the concepts he introduced no longer hold?
Listen to him: “New business strategies call for new marketing strategies and practices. We no longer believe that the marketer’s job is limited to managing the four P’s or to determining segmentation, targeting, and positioning.” Yes, Kotler is acknowledging major changes — and he has revised his theories.
And yet, Kotler always manages to be at the crest of the wave of these changes — and, from that perch, he sees major patterns and thus composes the big picture. He points out: “The old economy is based on the model of manufacturing that came out of the industrial revolution… The new economy, by contrast, emerges from the information revolution, with its advances in computerization, digitization, and telecommunications.”
Again, trust Kotler to illuminate history and current events. And trust him, too, to make fine distinctions: “Unfortunately, many people confuse the new economy with the high-flying dot-coms that burst on the scene … But the new economy is not only about dot-coms. It is about something more fundamental: the emergence of a network economy.”
There lies the central truth in this book. Businesses are much more networked — and firms that use such “connectedness” to the hilt will not only survive — but thrive in this century. The last word of the book’s title — “MarketingMoves” — was set in italics to underscore a point: Everything is dynamic. What we know as truth now may change overnight. Kotler, the marketing guru, made sure that point sinks. He changed his mind on many concepts and strategies. It’s time we changed ours.
By Philip Kotler, Dipak Jain & Suvit Maesingee
Harvard Business School Press, 2002
When mindset-altering changes hit us — scientific, business or mathematical — we, like a groggy boxer hit by a whammy, ask: “Wha’ happened?”
When Copernicus declared that the sun is the center of the universe, not the earth, that revolutionary statement rocked the scientific and theological foundations of the leaders of his time. When, after circumnavigating the world, the voyager said that the earth is round, not flat, everyone was confused and scholars went back to their drawing boards and threw away all studies that proceeded from a false premise.
When many scholars and businessmen declared that the “new economy” is upon us — driven by the information revolution — many wondered what happened, others wandered around in the “new wilderness” confused as ever, still many others unable to cope with dramatic changes went bankrupt — and the majority of us ask: “What is really happening?”
Many books have been written on the “new” economy, on “customer-driven” firms, on the meteorically rising and falling dot-coms, and on the baffling digital world. Many of these have been useful, giving us as they do, an understanding of one facet of such economy, or one astonishing aspect of such phenomenon. Thus, we sigh that, somehow, we can make sense out of this “new thing.”
But, it takes Philip Kotler, the marketing guru and principal author of “Marketing Moves” to make the “new economy” in its variegated forms understandable to many of us. Trust Kotler to spot previous concepts and say that they no longer hold true. For example, he juxtaposes two contrasting laws:
“Company growth in the industrial age was limited by the operation of the law of diminishing returns… (but) growth in the new economy is governed by self-reinforcing cycles. Consider Metcalfe’s law: The cost of the network expands linearly with increase in network size, but the value of the network increases exponentially.”
The above is just one of the nine “major shifts toward the digital economy,” which are discussed at length with a lot of insights in the book. You will be shocked to know that the phrases we used just yesterday have been thrown out of the window by Kotler and his team. For example, one other major movement is the shift “from corporate governance to market governance.” Just the other day, a seminar on corporate governance was held as if it was a newfound concept. Talking of keeping abreast of what is “in” and what is “out,” this book gives you a leading edge.
The book will not only make you fashionable and ahead of the rest. In fact, the more important contribution of this book is the way it has organized the new manifestations of the “digital economy” into bite-size clusters, making you able to relate otherwise separate developments.
The book says that marketing should not be the function of the marketing department alone — and that’s not new. What’s groundbreaking, though, is the authors’ construction of the “Holistic Marketing Framework” — which combines three important concerns — Customer Focus, Core Competencies and Collaborative Network.
At first glance, that doesn’t seem new either, until the authors show how market offerings, marketing activities, business architecture, and operational system all work together to drive corporate and business strategies that lead to profitability and shareholder value. Well, that’s a mouthful – but it is such because it delivers in a capsule how a company thrives in the digital economy.
Gird up for studying every “competitive platform” as prescribed by the guru himself. This book is not as thick as “Marketing Management,” authored by Kotler also and published two decades ago. (That’s our textbook at Asia’s premier graduate business school in the early eighties.) Has Kotler reinvented himself? Is he now saying that the concepts he introduced no longer hold?
Listen to him: “New business strategies call for new marketing strategies and practices. We no longer believe that the marketer’s job is limited to managing the four P’s or to determining segmentation, targeting, and positioning.” Yes, Kotler is acknowledging major changes — and he has revised his theories.
And yet, Kotler always manages to be at the crest of the wave of these changes — and, from that perch, he sees major patterns and thus composes the big picture. He points out: “The old economy is based on the model of manufacturing that came out of the industrial revolution… The new economy, by contrast, emerges from the information revolution, with its advances in computerization, digitization, and telecommunications.”
Again, trust Kotler to illuminate history and current events. And trust him, too, to make fine distinctions: “Unfortunately, many people confuse the new economy with the high-flying dot-coms that burst on the scene … But the new economy is not only about dot-coms. It is about something more fundamental: the emergence of a network economy.”
There lies the central truth in this book. Businesses are much more networked — and firms that use such “connectedness” to the hilt will not only survive — but thrive in this century. The last word of the book’s title — “MarketingMoves” — was set in italics to underscore a point: Everything is dynamic. What we know as truth now may change overnight. Kotler, the marketing guru, made sure that point sinks. He changed his mind on many concepts and strategies. It’s time we changed ours.
Sunday, July 07, 2002
A movement must change Its ‘theory’ or be marginalized
“The Communist Party
of the Philippines”
by Kathleen Weekley
University of the Philippines Press,
2001
We begin with a paraphrase of a saying that went the rounds among former or reluctant activists at age 30 or below, you have no heart; but if you are still an activist at 31 and above, you have no mind.”
Obviously, this quote downgrades activism as a passing interest. Which is not necessarily true. We have, for example, an activist Supreme Court, inhabited by justices already pushing 70!
But, a grain of truth is inescapable. Otherwise, how do you explain firebrand activists that figured in the First Quarter Storm in the early ‘70s – who now occupy comfortable sinecures in government or are top strategist in corporate boardrooms?
How do you make sense of leftists editors, who wrote editorials in college campus papers ringing with Marxist – Leninist rhetoric, who are now resident intellectuals in the highest rung of public policy makers.
Also, they have become gurus of propaganda and advocacy efforts of civil society. Or, they remained “ideologically pure” as academicians waxing nostalgic over a glorious past.
Where have all the revolutionaries gone? Quo vadis, “Revolution”?
What has happened to the revolutionary movement in the Philippines – a highly visible force in the ‘70s and ‘80s? Is it now a faint memory, a spent force? Or, is it lying low and quiet preceding a dramatic comeback?
“The Communist Party of the Philippines – 1968 – 1993,” written by Kathleen Weekley, a research fellow from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, is an interesting study of a movement that was very close to coming to power – or, at the very least, to sharing power with the country’s traditional rulers.
In 1985, according to this book, “the national revolutionary movement was a serious threat to the state” with around 30,000 members, 59 guerilla fronts and 24,000 regulars and part-timers.
This book is interesting on two counts. First, it is an instructive study of a national movement, driven by a revolutionary theory, swelled by “believers,” and strengthened by a show of force.
Second, it is a movement of “discovery” or “rediscovery” – as if a think layer of our social fabric is peeled off to reveal a world largely hidden from the public eye, whose underground activities occasionally shook the foundations of “visible society.”
We know much about recent history from the Marcosian dictatorship to the Ninoy Aquino assassination; from the first Edsa revolt to the ascendancy of two post Edsa Presidents Cory Quino and Fidel Ramos.
This book gives us a parallel – albeit largely hidden – history of a movement inspired by Karl Marx and indoctrinated by Mao Tse Tung, which infused energy to the left leaning labor movement and surfaced as a broad-based socialist coalition named the “National Democratic Front.”
As a doctoral dissertation, the study was actually interested in finding out the “place of theory” in revolutionary practice – with a disturbing conclusion that the “25 years of revolutionary practice indicated a problem with formulae.”
In layman’s terms, the author is saying that the movement could not have petered out if, midstream, it reassessed its assumptions and changed strategy to suit deep changes in political and social conditions.
The Communist Party’s mistake, the author concludes, is that it “ignored the relationship between the ‘objective and subjective reality.’” The view of the masses must be part of reality, and “not a convenient feature of a democratic struggle.”
The account is given a human face, especially when it discusses Jose Maria Sison’s intellectual treatises and Bernabe Buscayno’s folk heroism. It also provides us an insight into the previous appeal of the globalized “revolution” that has placed Mao and Che Guevarra on a pedestal.
The author is incisive when she discusses the deep split within the ranks of the Party, especially addressing the question whether the movement will continue the “armed struggle”.
She quotes a weary armed insurgent: “The argument for war is lost when the light of peace – however dim – shines through.”
This organizational “wedge” cut more deeply when the Party was divided over whether to boycott the 1986 elections or not. The Party finally decided to stay away from the electoral exercise – which led, according to Ms Weekley, to its “political marginalization.”
A section, titled “From Vanguard to Rearguard,” captures the decline (from the author’s viewpoint) of movement.
Actually, one discerns a sympathetic treatment from an author whose passion and interest are on issues of national identity, citizenship and human rights. She rues the fact that the movement even during its “rectification campaign, “ still wanted to “return to a world that no longer exists.”
So you ask: What’s the value of a study that analyzes the decline of a movement?
First (if you just change the ideological bent), this becomes an excellent guide to driving a new movement toward achieving a goal. Second, you will realize once again, especially in this century, that theory must change when times are deeply altered. And third, know that a socialist opposition – this time wearing the garb of non-violence – may still provide the necessary counterweight to the extreme right. And thus, make real democracy possible.
of the Philippines”
by Kathleen Weekley
University of the Philippines Press,
2001
We begin with a paraphrase of a saying that went the rounds among former or reluctant activists at age 30 or below, you have no heart; but if you are still an activist at 31 and above, you have no mind.”
Obviously, this quote downgrades activism as a passing interest. Which is not necessarily true. We have, for example, an activist Supreme Court, inhabited by justices already pushing 70!
But, a grain of truth is inescapable. Otherwise, how do you explain firebrand activists that figured in the First Quarter Storm in the early ‘70s – who now occupy comfortable sinecures in government or are top strategist in corporate boardrooms?
How do you make sense of leftists editors, who wrote editorials in college campus papers ringing with Marxist – Leninist rhetoric, who are now resident intellectuals in the highest rung of public policy makers.
Also, they have become gurus of propaganda and advocacy efforts of civil society. Or, they remained “ideologically pure” as academicians waxing nostalgic over a glorious past.
Where have all the revolutionaries gone? Quo vadis, “Revolution”?
What has happened to the revolutionary movement in the Philippines – a highly visible force in the ‘70s and ‘80s? Is it now a faint memory, a spent force? Or, is it lying low and quiet preceding a dramatic comeback?
“The Communist Party of the Philippines – 1968 – 1993,” written by Kathleen Weekley, a research fellow from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, is an interesting study of a movement that was very close to coming to power – or, at the very least, to sharing power with the country’s traditional rulers.
In 1985, according to this book, “the national revolutionary movement was a serious threat to the state” with around 30,000 members, 59 guerilla fronts and 24,000 regulars and part-timers.
This book is interesting on two counts. First, it is an instructive study of a national movement, driven by a revolutionary theory, swelled by “believers,” and strengthened by a show of force.
Second, it is a movement of “discovery” or “rediscovery” – as if a think layer of our social fabric is peeled off to reveal a world largely hidden from the public eye, whose underground activities occasionally shook the foundations of “visible society.”
We know much about recent history from the Marcosian dictatorship to the Ninoy Aquino assassination; from the first Edsa revolt to the ascendancy of two post Edsa Presidents Cory Quino and Fidel Ramos.
This book gives us a parallel – albeit largely hidden – history of a movement inspired by Karl Marx and indoctrinated by Mao Tse Tung, which infused energy to the left leaning labor movement and surfaced as a broad-based socialist coalition named the “National Democratic Front.”
As a doctoral dissertation, the study was actually interested in finding out the “place of theory” in revolutionary practice – with a disturbing conclusion that the “25 years of revolutionary practice indicated a problem with formulae.”
In layman’s terms, the author is saying that the movement could not have petered out if, midstream, it reassessed its assumptions and changed strategy to suit deep changes in political and social conditions.
The Communist Party’s mistake, the author concludes, is that it “ignored the relationship between the ‘objective and subjective reality.’” The view of the masses must be part of reality, and “not a convenient feature of a democratic struggle.”
The account is given a human face, especially when it discusses Jose Maria Sison’s intellectual treatises and Bernabe Buscayno’s folk heroism. It also provides us an insight into the previous appeal of the globalized “revolution” that has placed Mao and Che Guevarra on a pedestal.
The author is incisive when she discusses the deep split within the ranks of the Party, especially addressing the question whether the movement will continue the “armed struggle”.
She quotes a weary armed insurgent: “The argument for war is lost when the light of peace – however dim – shines through.”
This organizational “wedge” cut more deeply when the Party was divided over whether to boycott the 1986 elections or not. The Party finally decided to stay away from the electoral exercise – which led, according to Ms Weekley, to its “political marginalization.”
A section, titled “From Vanguard to Rearguard,” captures the decline (from the author’s viewpoint) of movement.
Actually, one discerns a sympathetic treatment from an author whose passion and interest are on issues of national identity, citizenship and human rights. She rues the fact that the movement even during its “rectification campaign, “ still wanted to “return to a world that no longer exists.”
So you ask: What’s the value of a study that analyzes the decline of a movement?
First (if you just change the ideological bent), this becomes an excellent guide to driving a new movement toward achieving a goal. Second, you will realize once again, especially in this century, that theory must change when times are deeply altered. And third, know that a socialist opposition – this time wearing the garb of non-violence – may still provide the necessary counterweight to the extreme right. And thus, make real democracy possible.
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