What is Positioning All About?

To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the only reality that counts is what's already in your prospect's mind.

• To create something truly unique that doesn't already exist in the mind is becoming more and more difficult, if not impossible.
• The most basic approach to positioning is manipulating what's already common knowledge in your prospects mind and to retie the connections that already exist with a concept that feels new.
• Our marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There's too many copycats trying to create noise. Some of them are actually good, most of them suck. The ones who suck create distrust in the market.

Positioning Skeptics will ask Why?

"Why do we need a new approach to advertising and marketing our services?"

The Oversaturated Ecosystem

In 2022, per capita advertising spending in the United States surpassed?1.02 thousand U.S. dollars, up 11 percent from almost 921 dollars a year earlier. According to another source's projections, ad revenues in the U.S. will surpass 350 billion dollars in 2023.

In a massively oversaturated ecosystem the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a really simple word, "positioning".

Our consumer's minds are playing constant defense and rejecting most information being offered. In general, the mind only accepts that which matches prior knowledge or experience.

Millions of dollars is wasted every year trying to change the consumers mind with advertising. You have to come to the realization that once the mind is made up it's almost impossible to change it. Nobody likes to be told they are wrong so using mind changing tactics is a quick path to wasting effort and money on ineffective marketing.

The Oversimplified Mind

The average mind is already a dripping sponge. It can only absorb so much information at the cost of what is already there. Yet, we continue to pour more information into the oversaturated minds of our prospect and get triggered when our messages fail.

Key Takeaway: Only a tiny fraction of the message ends up in the mind of our prospect.

Our prospects are overwhelmed with information and so they tighten the intake valve to guard what actually gets in. (typically subconsciously)

Essentially our prospect is accepting less and less of what's freely available. Communication itself is the communication problem.

The Oversimplified Message

The best approach to positioning to take in an oversaturated ecosystem is to oversimplify our message.

Less is becoming more. Essentially, sharpen your message to cut into the mind of your prospect. This is really the only way to make a long lasting impression.

This means we must be selective and chose the material that has the best chance of getting through.

The enemy is volume of communication. Once you can understand the nature of the problem only then can you understand the solution.

The classic mistake is looking for the solution in your service or inside your own mind. You will only find the solution when you start playing in the mind of your prospect.

In simple terms, since only a little bit of your message is going to get out anyway, you must focus on the perception of your prospect. Not the reality of your service.

Remember, "The customer is always right." So by extension the seller is always wrong.

Turn the process around, focus on the prospect, not the service. By doing this you greatly increase the effectiveness of how you communicate with your prospect.