Page 39 - MYM 2015

Many companies still write positioning statements for their brands. Many marketing programs call for establishing positions in consumers’ minds.
As recently as the year 2009, the readers of Advertising Age selected Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind as the best book they have ever read on the subject of marketing.
That same year, the Harvard Business School Press published a book entitled The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. (Positioning was one of the 100 best.)
Lexus, for example, lled a hole called Japanese luxury vehicle. Once the
Lexus brand was securely positioned in consumers’ minds, it was almost invulnerable to competition from In niti and Acura.
In today’s over-communicated society, consumers will remember very few verbal slogans. No matter how cleverly constructed or how well your marketing concept tests in focus groups, if consumers can’t remember your message, then all is lost.
What Messages Stick In the Mind?
What’s the glue that holds some concepts in a person’s memory for years, even decades?
Emotion.
Think about your past. What events do you remember the most? Those events that raised your pulse rate and your blood pressure. Those events
that were emotional.
The day that you got married. The day you had your car accident. The day you got promoted. The day you bought your rst house. These are all events you can “picture” in your mind.
Yet the positioning concept has a weakness. Invariably, positioning strategy is expressed verbally. In executing a positioning strategy, you look for a verbal hole in the mind and
then you try to ll that
hole with your brand
name.
The Best Way into a Human Mind
languages?
In spite of the
successes of “verbal”
positioning strategies, it
may come as a surprise to some marketing people that the best way into a human mind is not with words at all. It’s with visuals.
In 1973, psychology professor Lionel Standing conducted a research study in which he asked subjects to look at 10,000 images over a ve-day period. Each image was presented for ve seconds each.
When the research subjects were showed pairs of images (one they had seen before and one they had not), they remembered 70 percent of the images they had seen.
That statistic is phenomenal. Try presenting 10,000 verbal slogans for ve seconds each and see how many of them a person will remember ve days later.
How do you
translate your
brand’s position
into some
6,000 spoken
Visuals have an emotional power that printed words and aural sounds do not. Observe people in a theater watching a movie. Quite often they will laugh
out loud, sometimes even cry.
Now observe a person reading a novel, perhaps
the same novel the motion picture was based on. Seldom will you see any outward signs of emotional involvement.
That’s the difference between visuals on a screen and printed words in a book. One is emotional; the other is not.
Yet most marketing people treat words and visuals as if there were equivalent. Even worse, they think in words; they communicate in words; they live in a verbal world where visuals are what you use to “decorate” text, much like a medieval book.
Words versus Visuals
Compare the printed word “baby” with a visual of a baby. There’s a big difference between how a mind absorbs
mind I39 your
marketing