3 Marketing Essentials

By Peter Andersen
Posted Tuesday, August 31, 2004

To succeed in the digital marketplace you must focus your marketing efforts. What follows are a few marketing principles that emphasize positioning, top-of-mind awareness, and delivering a focused-impact.

Positioning is a powerful concept in marketing. To illustrate, have you ever visited a fast food restaurant and in a rush to complete your order asked for a coke when you "perhaps" meant to order some other soft drink? The Coke brand and its owners have achieved a top of mind awareness. Their brand name has become synonymous with a commodity that has a strong demand.

A lot of their success may be attributed to being the first successful soft drink on the mass market, other possibilities may be due to their perpetual multi-million dollar global marketing campaigns that span life-times as well as cultures. Whatever the true cause, the Coke brand has established a very successful & fortified position.

Another example of a strong positioning statement that achieves a great top of mind awareness is Verizon's "Can you Hear Me Now" campaign. How many times have you uttered those exact words, sometimes even consciously when you or the person the on other end of the line has a weak signal. In most cases, what follows are expressed or unexpressed images about the "Can You Hear Me Now Guy."

Professional marketers know that with strong positioning, it is nearly impossible to be out-flanked by the competition using moderate marketing dollars alone. A handful of cases exist where product owners with seemingly unlimited/ multi-million dollar marketing budgets were unsuccessful at winning significant market share against a product with an established position.

Given a strong position that is known by the market, the competition is better off not competing on your terms, because the consumer already intuitively associates your brand with the commodity and has successfully filed you away in their mental filing cabinets as occupying that "spot." Therefore, when marketing communications arrive that are contrary to the consumer's product knowledge, they are challenged or unconsciously blocked/denied by the mind.

Now, having demonstrated the power of a strong positioning statement and the need to create a focused-impact, log-on to this search engine site to see an interactive demonstration of how positioning can help you achieve the coveted "top-of-mind." (http://www.hawaiisearchengine.com/)

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Power Positioning Exercise: Can you think of a few viral-like positions (intentional or not) that help reinforce Mountain Dew's Code Red brand? Hint: One deals with extreme heat/humidity advisories within U.S. Cities & States that have extreme summer temperatures.
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Focused Impact Media Group specializes in integrated marketing communications. We are skilled at optimizing results by coordinating multiple communication channels into a highly focused-impact that enhances brand identity, positioning and market awareness. For more information and to receive our popular monthly newsletter visit (http://www.focusedimpact.com/)

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