I cataloged and classified corporate marketing positioning and delivery (creative treatments) over a roughly 35 year period. I did this as both research for a book I began writing and haven’t finished, and to serve as a “cheat sheet” for marketing classes I taught.

A great marketer is deep enough to have profound insight into human nature, but shallow enough to use it for financial gain.
My inner Mr. Hyde

Positioning Strategies

As AL Ries and Jack Trout established, Positioning is the image of a product in the mind of the consumer, and is expressed relative to the position of competitors.

Dream Detection – What the consumer dreams of having
Problem Detection – The problem the consumer is trying to solve
Risk Detection – Monetary – “I could lose my money on this”
Risk Detection – Functional – “Another brand might not work”
Risk Detection – Physical – “I could get hurt if I don’t have this”, “My hair will fall out” (Minoxidil), “I won’t get an erection” (Pfizer’s Viagra). Powerful stuff.
Risk Detection – Social – “What will people think if I don’t have this?”
Risk Detection – Psychological – “I will feel irresponsible without this”
Brand – Heritage – (e.g. Wells Fargo – 150 years)
Brand – Market Specialty – The area of focus & expertise
Repositioning the Competition – Move a new idea in by first moving the current one out. Example: Tylenol repositioning Aspirin¹.
Attribute – Social Proof – Using credentials or facts about consumer expertise or awards
Attribute – How a Product is Made – Appealing (not necessarily unique) descriptions of production (“Cold filtered”, “100% Egyptian cotton”)
Attribute – Being first, ONLY, or #1 – Emphasizing a company’s leadership (e.g. Ford Motors)
1. The only company with a solution
Attribute – Being the Latest – Emphasizing a company’s new, cutting edge position (“Changing the way people think about television”). If you ever have a great idea and someone names someone already doing that, as if to disuade you, don’t be. Being the latest can be more effective than being the first. Besides, marketers are competitive. Steal market share!

1. Tylenol’s repositioning of aspirin ad copy:
“Aspirin can irritate the stomach lining, trigger asthmatic or allergic reactions, cause small amounts of hidden gastrointestinal bleeding. Fortunately, there is Tylenol….”

Positioning: Creative Delivery

The list below is a partial representation of the options for creative delivery of the positioning strategy in advertisements.

Attributes – A patch vs. a pill in a pharmaceutical, a new ingredient in a toothpaste, longer life in a battery
Benefits – Clears up your skin, stops joint damage, you can send pictures with your cell phone
Target market characteristics – Would-be athletes, working moms, style-conscious teenagers
Occasions or situations in which the product is valuable: weddings, business meetings, social gatherings
Celebrity endorsements – Shawn Fanning investing in cancer immunotherapy
Sports team connections
Affinity groups – U.S. Marine Corps, Notre Dame, Shriners Hospitals
Qualifications – Most rigorously tested, associated with UCLA Medical Center, top rated by CNET
Social Responsibility – 10% of all profits go to World Health Organization, we support Breast Cancer Awareness
Intangibles – Makes you glad to be alive, more patient with your kids, you feel more secure behind the wheel

Campaign Overview

Marketing Outputs (goals)

Awareness / familiarity
Product / brand perceptions
Whitepaper download / interaction
Sales lead
Purchase consideration
Satisfaction with product
Post-purchase experience with product/brand
Unit sales
Revenue & share in dollars

Metrics in a Marketing Performance Audit

Total awareness (unaided and aided)
Familiarity with the product or service
Favorable impressions of the product
Predisposition to act
Ever purchased or used the product or service
Bought or used the product the last time the customer made a purchase decision
Customer delight/annoyance; switching behavior
Satisfaction with the brand; would recommend to others
Intent to reorder or buy again
Brand and customer equity

Advertising Creative Brief Requirements

As the “father of marketing” Philip Kotler has written, “To get it right the first time, the most important steps are targeting and positioning. If you nail these two components of strategy, everything else follows.”

Example

– Our primary target is senior executives and managers/analysts in large companies ($500 million-plus annual sales). People faced with the challenge of helping grow their business while reducing costs and making those decisions today, not tomorrow.

– Our positioning is that we are uniquely capable of quickly creating network solutions that address the specific, complex needs of businesses with many offices, customers, and suppliers around the world.

– Our products and services can be installed faster than anything our competitors offer.

– Our personality is serious about our work but fun and easy to work with. Our clients love the products and services but enjoy working with us to install them.

– The emotional benefit we provide is psychological comfort; we can and will help our clients make better decisions quickly. They can count on it.

Tylenol repositions the competition

“For the millions who should not take aspirin”

As anyone in marketing can tell you, unseating category leaders is difficult. That’s why Pepsi has trailed Coca-Cola for decades and why Tide has remained the leading detergent since the 1940s. It’s not impossible though, and one of the best ways to advertise against a category leader is to use their brand presence in your own favor. The best way to do that is to run a repositioning campaign.

In essence, repositioning the competition requires comparative advertising, but it is not simply comparative advertising. Comparative ads evaluate products side-by-side. Repositioning ads try to take an attribute of the competitors product and shift it into a weakness. Then they show how their own product fills that gap. Most of a repositioning advertisement should be devoted to your competitor’s product, and not even the product as it exists in reality, but as it exists in the mind of consumers. Only once the ad has succeeded in framing their competitors’ products attributes as weaknesses do they introduce their own product. One of the most famous repositioning campaigns was done by Tylenol. In this advertisement Tylenol isn’t even mentioned until the third paragraph!

Let’s take a closer look at the ad. “For the millions who should not take aspirin” is a very interesting line. Many people today are still unaware of the differences between over the counter analgesics, before this ad even fewer were. It’s interesting because it’s alarming enough to draw in the uninformed. Notice, too, that the ad doesn’t say Tylenol is better than aspirin. It doesn’t even directly say that Tylenol is better for the stomach. Right now, it’s only saying some people shouldn’t use aspirin. It’s avoiding those comparative statements because comparative statements can conflict with consumers pre-held notions, and if they do they are likely to get dismissed.¹ Instead, the ad tries to convey new information – the instances in which taking aspirin is detrimental and, as it builds that case, it lets the consumers decide for themselves that Tylenol is better. That’s the essence of repositioning.

Remember, Tylenol was doing more than just creating niches for itself to occupy, which can also be an effective way to gain market share. Instead, it went beyond that strategy, put those holes together, and used them to reposition aspirin as a brand that was harmful to the stomach. In fact, Tylenol was so successful in conveying this information that it gained considerable market share and eventually the product actually displaced the aspirin-based medicines and became the best selling analgesic.

Footnotes

1. This is the result of confirmation bias which causes people to seek information that confirms their opinions and to dismiss information which contradicts them.