Positioning – For What It’s Worth

Different Strokes
About products that speak to people

Of all the professional fields to come to grips with, I struggled the most with Marketing. By character and education, I lean to the rational and analytical. But Marketing and its practitioners I met seemed anything but that. Then one day, running some training session with a colleague, she taught me a significant insight and everything changed.

The training session in question was for the next generation of high potentials, emerging leaders who got brought together for a crisp but deep introduction to what all departments were doing. For the Sales & Marketing portion, I was talking about pricing, new product introduction processes and other such go-to-market type. My colleague complemented that with a crash course on branding, customer segmenetation and communication and that sort of stuff. While we were building the lecture together, she came up with a beautiful example to illustrate the “Positioning” concept. That was the first time it dawned on me that there genuinely are first principles to discover and study in the Marketing field – which honestly I could have realized a lot sooner, considering it is the subject of serious academic research as opposed to, say, astrology.

The Positioning example came from a 2014 Harvard Business Review case study. It involved a company called Quidel, manufacturers of the first commercial pregnancy test in 1983. Although this is one product, Quidel realized they had two very different groups of customers. The “hopefuls” try to conceive and are hoping for a positive result of their pregnancy test. The “fearfuls” on the other hand look for confirmation that they are not pregnant. So Quidel took two different approaches to cater to both groups. For the fearfuls, they called the product “RapidVue” and sold it in a clinical-looking box in the same aisle as contraceptives. For the hopefuls, they packaged a “BabyStart” product in a much warmer and natural design, complete with a photo of a smiling baby, and placed it in a different part of the store. They also priced it 50% higher. Quidel also communicated in a different way to both groups, emphasizing things like quality to the fearfuls but having a more emotional narrative of hope and excitement to the hopefuls.

“Positioning” is this practice of approaching different customer segments differently. The crucial insight here is that successful positioning is all about the mind of the customer. Notice how Quidel’s strategy worked not by changing the fundamental product—the pregnancy test itself remained identical—but by reshaping how customers felt about it. The clinical packaging and placement spoke to the fearfuls’ desire for discretion and medical reliability, while the baby imagery triggered entirely different emotional associations for the hopefuls. This reveals positioning’s power to tap into the irrational, emotional layers of customer perception rather than simply addressing logical product features.

As Al Reis wrote in his ground breaking book on the topic, “The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.” Positioning does not revolve around the reality of your product, but around the customer’s perception. This principle of working with existing mental frameworks rather than fighting them is brilliantly illustrated in the fictional 1960s advertising world of “Mad Men”. In the pilot episode, Don Draper demonstrates great positioning insight when working with his biggest client, a tobacco company. Their harsh reality is emerging scientific evidence that smoking is bad for you, and a regulatory regime tightening the screws on what you are allowed to say and what you are forced to do. But Don realizes effective communication does not need to confront this uncomfortable reality head-on. Instead, the right message resonates with thoughts and emotions the customer already feels, and simply wants to see recognized and mirrored back…

The pregnancy test example made me truly realize the importance of Marketing for the first time. Everybody professes to being customer-centric. Who wouldn’t? But in reality, the vast majority of people in product management, engineering and operations – let alone more remote functions such as finance or legal – think and reason about customer needs or value propositions in terms of product features. The frame of reference, concepts and terminology are still company-internal. That’s why the pregnancy test case is such a powerful example to induce a mindset shift. Everybody instantly understands that a hopeful message will land badly with a fearful woman. It’s also obvious this effect is completely unrelated to the product as such, which is 100% identical for the fearfuls and the hopefuls. And once you understand this, you can’t but conclude there is value in a discipline that researches and analyzes the underlying principles of effective communication, to design and develop more effective communication campaigns.

Other than gaining respect and interest in the entire Marketing field, I dove a bit deeper into the specific Positioning topic. What principles can explain why it works when it’s properly done? Conversely, inverting the question, what seem like communication mistakes we could make leading to a reasonable expectation of failure? First, since it is the customer who ultimately decides how to spend their attention and their money, it stands to reason that their perception matters more than objective reality. Second, experience teaches us that the same message can land very differently based on situational or emotional context. And third, we know people don’t always use their full brain or a lot of reasoning to make sense of new information – or quickly decide if it is even worth processing – but use cognitive shortcuts, engrained heuristics or well known associations. Or to phrase it in the negative: how much effectiveness can we expect from a mental model where everybody shares the same objective reality, processes a message the same way regardless of circumstances, and invariably brings their full cognitive attention? I don’t think that’s anybody’s experience spending some time in the real world.

Consider Patagonia’s positioning in the outdoor apparel market. Competitors like The North Face focus on technical performance and extreme conditions. Patagonia positions itself around environmental responsibility and corporate activism. The jackets may have similar technical specifications, but Patagonia taps into customers’ identity and values—their desire to see themselves as environmentally conscious. This emotional positioning allows them to charge premium prices and build fierce customer loyalty, demonstrating how perception primacy and context dependency work together. The brand becomes a cognitive shortcut for “responsible outdoor gear” in customers’ minds. The first time Patagonia ever did a TV ad, it didn’t talk about product at all.

One source I studied was the book coining the term “Positioning” in the first place: Al Reis and Jack Trout’s 1981 “Positioning: the battle for your mind.” Shifting the focus from the product itself to its perception in the customer’s mind was revolutionary at the time. Two other ideas stood up to the test of time. First, positioning is inherently relative, as your brand or product needs to differentiate versus your competitor’s in the mind of the customer. Second, in a age of information overload your message should be simple and easy to understand. (From our current vantage point, 1981 ‘information overload’ looks almost comically benign – which only strengthens the case for brevity in today’s noisy information landscape.) The book shows its age in the examples and cases presented though. They mostly involve big, established brands which need to cut through the noise in mass media, but are less relevant to start-ups and scale-ups and today’s fragmented digital media landscape.

“Advertising is not a debate. It’s a seduction.”

― Al Ries (in “Positioning: The battle for your mind”)

As I researched Positioning, it also triggered memories of my time as a Purchasing Manager. Six months into the job, after I’d concluded my first major competitive tender for laundry detergent chemicals, my boss asked me how I planned to inform my suppliers – especially the ones whose volumes would be reduced. Now this boss was a super smart Lebanese guy, phenomenally talented and a strong believer in relentlessly drilling his newcomers. This guy was tough with us and I’d been on the receiving end of a constant barrage of coaching, criticism and challenges. So I immediately had my guards up I was probably going to learn an important lesson again. “Well… I guess I’ll simply say we decided to reduce your volumes”, said I. “If you do that, you basically say I the big powerful arrogant jerk of a buyer am doing something bad and unpleasant to you the small weak supplier”, he responded. “It’s not nice. You basically place yourself at the opposite side of them. It damages the relationship for no reason. How about you say I am truly sorry your competitors have been very aggressive in stealing away business from you? Next time, let’s see how we can work together to remedy this situation.” [Which meant reducing prices, of course.] It’s the same idea: even if the underlying reality doesn’t change, we can alter and shape the perception.

For a wickedly entertaining masterclass in positioning as perception management, look no further than the comedy “Thank You For Smoking”. Aaron Eckhart is brilliant impersonating Nick Naylor, a guy with one of the toughest jobs imaginable: lobbyist for Big Tobacco. Talk about having reality against you… Nick’s genius is in playing the entire perception register so deftly you can’t help but enjoy.

An awareness and appreciation of positioning is one thing, knowing how to effectively execute is another. Reis and Trout’s book isn’t very helpful in that respect. Entertaining as their examples sometimes are, they all smack a little of “Here’s this pickle we found ourselves in to differentiate product X and communicate about it above the noise level, and one flash of divine inspiration later here’s the brilliant solution we came up with.” The closest thing to a practical framework I found is April Dunford’s “Obv!ously Awesome”. The book is structured as a step by step guide to position a product with a target segment. It’s pretty hands-on and ‘ll write up a detailed review seperately, but she offers some interesting general insights too. I like Dunford’s realistic definition of who and what your competition is. In most companies, if you ask somebody that question they typically respond with the name of another company in your industry. Dunford asks a different question: “What will the customer do if they don’t buy from us?” That will produce higher quality insights, because the reality may be you compete with “an intern with Excel” or even “Do nothing”. Another astute observation is her differentiation between features and benefits that are either “consideration” or “retention” attributes. That resonates with my own work on a value framework in which I differentiate “Willingness to Play”, “Willingness to Pay”, and “Willingness to Stay” value elements.

“Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.”

― April Dunford (from “Obv!ously Awesome: How to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it, love it”)

In conclusion, the Positioning concept is an easy to understand example of how things aren’t just about what they are, but also about what they appear to be. It ties closely to the notion that in communication, a message passes between a sender and a receiving audience with a completely different frame of reference. If the message passes at all: as Reis already pointed out, it needs to fight for attention in a sea of competing messages and noise. Perception matters. In the training course I referred to, the one where I first heard the Hopefuls vs Fearfuls example, one attendant actually got pretty disillusioned by all our talk about perception and positioning. “I work on all these difficult problems, bug fixes and features every day, and I am beginning to wonder what the point is if this is anyway not what we communicate to the customer.” That is of course also not the truth. If your positioning isn’t underpinned by the product’s reality, the customer will see through your attempt at perception management and see it for what it is -only spin and vacuous fluff which all of us are only too familiar with. Nevertheless, there’s purpose and method in marketing – and left brainers solely focused on the product are missing out on half a world. The truth of perception is reality too.

Different strokes

Credits

Words > Stefan Verstraeten

Ideas > Ketaki Chand taught me the Hopefuls/Fearfuls example.

> Camille Chammas taught me the fine art of positioning in commercial negotiations, and many, many other things.

> Al Reis and Jack Trout, “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind“, 1981 (McGraw-Hill), ISBN13 978-0446342346

> April Dunford, “Obv!ously Aesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love it“, 2019 (Ambient Press), ISBN13 978-1999023003

Photo >

Video > “Mad Men”, pilot episode, AMC

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Different Strokes