Positioning Guides 3 & 4

Positioning Guide #3:    All trade is conducted in the human mind. Leo Burnett, 1956

Positioning Guide #4:    Brand positioning takes place in the minds of your target customers.  Al Ries & Jack Trout, 1981

Before Al Ries and Jack Trout popularized the concept of brand positioning, Leo Burnett -- founder of the famous Chicago-based advertising agency -- recognized that leading brands enjoy a bigger and healthier share of the target customer’s mind.  He summarized the cause of this phenomenon with the ground rule that “all trade is conducted in the human mind.” 

We often think of customers purchasing at a given retail outlet.  This line of thought was reinforced by Jerry McCarthy  in his Basic Marketing text [William D. Perreault Jr., E. Jerome McCarthy, and Joseph P. Cannon, Basic Marketing, 17th edition (New York:  McGraw-Hill/Irwin), 2008].  In that text he gave the concept of the marketing mix a new name, the 4Ps.  He reduced the channels of distribution element of the marketing mix was to the “P” word of “Place.”  The actual purchase may take place at a retail outlet or “place”, but it takes place in the mind of the customer.

Building upon the work of Leo Burnett and others, Al Ries and Jack Trout popularized the concept of brand positioning in a series of articles published in Advertising Age and in their now-classic book on brand positioning. [Al Ries & Jack Trout, Positioning:  The Battle for Your Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill), 2000.]  Philip Kotler has said of this book:  “Positioning is a revolutionary idea precisely because it cuts across the other four P’s. It informs each of the P’s and adds consistency to them.  Ever since the 1972 series Advertising Age articles on the subject by the two authors of this book, the discipline of marketing has never been the same.”  And my own thanks to Ries and Trout who inspired many of the positioning guides in this blog.