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July 19, 2004

Ries and Trout

I remember the first time I read Positioning, really made clear so many of the core challenges of marketers. Well, Ries (and Ries) and Trout still at it.

Al and Laurie Ries' have a new book, The Origin of Brands. Looks really intriguing. And Laura Ries has entered the blogsphere with her new blog. And she's already generating a lot of attention. Her most recent entry on Positioning Alive and Well covers some key levers/strategies for positioning from "the prospect's point of view"
1. pricing (the open hole) - going premium or discount
2. creating a new category you can be great in
3. go for the number two spot
4. the specialist
5. the channel brand
6. the gender brand

Brand Mantra likes the number 2 strategy. In his very good interview with Laura, BJ Olin highlighted on interesting tidbit about the importance of focus, not just for startups but for all marketers pursuing any of these strategies. Here here.

Meanwhile, the book and blog sparked a different kind of discussion at Radio Marketing Nexus, where the opinions ranged from re-hash to dangerously out of date. Hmmm..

Personally, I'm ok with rehashing. Basics are good to take a fresh look at. But, what the heck, I can't help but try to relate all this to the 5 Plays.
- Going for number 2 feels like a classic way to win by direct comparison - which you do in a Dragrace.
- Filling the pricing hole is something you can do in both a dragrace (as a tool for winning or in a Hi-Low Play where you are trying to get both margin ends of a market.
- creating a category is something you kind of do when you run best of both by collapsing two opposite ends, but I guess we have conservative bent to avoid telling people it's a revolutionary, new category but rather an improvement of an old one (the old horseless carriage vs. automobile play)
- the channel brand is at least in part what becoming a platform entails, although it seems to cover other scenarios too
- and both the specialist and gender brand concepts feel to me like they at least start out as stealth or add-on plays where rather than confronting the biggest competitors head on you slice of niches (by the way, I think ethnic is as important as gender as a brand play).

Seperately, Jack Trout recently gave a pitch on positioning to the AMA (check out the slides here). One of the main points was that strategy = survival. Well, as you might have gathered from previous posts, we just couldn't agree more.

Posted by johnza at July 19, 2004 09:10 PM

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