Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind 
by Al Ries and Jack Trout. 
Warner Books, 1986 Edition
ISBN: 0-446-34794-9

It's a very small book, and you can easily read through it in one sitting, though you take years to apply the knowledge.

This book starts with the proposition that you can position anything: a product, an idea, yourself, a country, anything. In the authors' terms,  positioning is "what you do in the mind of the prospect." Because it is very difficult to create something in the mind of a prospect, you have to take what is there and change it. In the authors' words, you have "to retie the connections that already exist."

With positioning, you look for the ideas, the words, the way to get inside the minds of your prospects. You have to concentrate on the receiver, and not on your message. As Ries and Trout write, "It be cynical to accept the premise that the sender is wrong and the receiver is right. But you really have no other choice. Not if you want to get your message accepted by another human mind."

Because advertising is so powerful, so omnipresent, and so repetitive, competeting with all these messages from advertising isn't easy. But it's what positioning is all about. It's cutting through the maze to find the mind of the listener and speak to them—in their terms.

This little book (only 210 small pages) is chock full of good advice. You not like it all, as frankly it reads of manipulation, but the authors make a case that if you want to get noticed you had better watch out for some traps, and then begin to position yourself, your business, your career.

Ries and Trout present examples of positioning companies, products, countries, and even the Catholic Church. If you have ever wanted to have a short hand education from Madison Avenue thinking, this is the book for you. We recommend you read it in segments and think carefully about what the authors are saying. We guarantee you are going to be able to apply some of their concepts to just about anything to which you are interested in drawing attention.

Janelle Barlow, President
TMI USA
 

Previous "Owl Book Review Grove" pages:
 

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#2	Bennis, An Invented Life
#3	Morrison, The Second Curve
#4	Foster, How to Get Ideas
#5	Bear, Send This Jerk the Bedbug Letter
#6	Hemphill, Taming the Paper Tiger
#7	Rifkin, Time Wars
#8	Pearce, Leading Out Loud
#9	Kao, Jamming
#10	Tannen, The Argument Culture
#11	Nancy, More Letters From a Nut
#12	Anders, Health Against Wealth
#13	Yates, The Critical Path
#14	Langdon, The New Language of Work
#15	Needleman, Time and the Soul
#16	Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence
#17	Conger, Winning 'Em Over
#18	Shapiro & Jankowski, The Power of Nice
#19	Fradette & Michaud, The Power of Corporate Kinetics
#20	Upshaw, Building Brand Identity

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