Positioning, Ries and Trout: owning a word
Read the ladders in a buyer's head from a 200-owner recall survey, decide whether to climb a taken rung or claim an empty one, and measure the result.
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Positioning, as Al Ries and Jack Trout defined it in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981), is not something done to a product. It is the place the product holds in the buyer's head, relative to the names already there. The buyer keeps a ladder for each category with one name on each rung, so a newcomer has three moves: take a lower rung, find a ladder nobody stands on, or reposition the name above it. Which of the three is open can be counted with a 200-person survey before a word of copy is written.
The mistake: claiming a rung somebody owns
A headline the team drafted for the clinic scheduler said "the best scheduling software for small clinics". It describes the product and moves nobody, because the owner reading it already holds a scheduling ladder with both rungs taken, so the claim is filed under a name they already know, or dropped.
Ries and Trout's observation is that the mind resists information that contradicts what it already holds. The first name a buyer learned in a category stays on top long after better products arrive, because displacing it means the buyer admitting a mistake. Being better is not a position; being first in the mind is.
Reading the ladder from a survey
Ask a sample of buyers to name a product in the category, unaided, and count first mentions. Assume the scheduler's team asked 200 owners of clinics with one to five practitioners, at a regional association meeting, "Name a scheduling product for clinics":
first mention owners
$400 practice-management suite 140 (70%)
$29 booking tool 45 (about 22%)
any third name 0
named nothing 15
Two names and no third. Both rungs of the "clinic scheduling" ladder are taken, and the empty third rung says there is no room: a third scheduling product, however good, is filed as "another one of those".
The incumbents show the two ways to hold a rung. The suite was first in the mind, the name owners met when they first looked at software. The $29 tool holds rung 2 by defining itself against rung 1, as the cheap one, and that pays: last year 30% of the scheduler's demo prospects used the $29 tool and only 25% the suite.
First in owns the rung; the second rung is still worth having
Ries and Trout's best-known rung-2 case is Avis, second to Hertz in car rental, which advertised itself as number two and trying harder. Naming the relationship to the leader let a buyer file Avis at once, next to a name they already held.
For the scheduler, rung 2 is held on price, and at $99 the scheduler costs 3.4 times the $29 tool, so it cannot be the cheap one. Rung 1 means overtaking a name 140 of 200 owners give first: even with all 60 who named the $29 tool or nothing, the scheduler would still have to win 41 of the suite's 140. Both moves on this ladder are closed.
Cherchez le créneau: find the hole
The phrase, a heading in the book's chapter on followers, is French for "look for the hole": a ladder buyers have a reason to climb that has no name on it yet. The same 200 owners were asked a second question, "Name a product that cuts no-shows." None named a product. Asked what they do about no-shows, 120 of 200 said someone phones patients the day before.
An empty ladder is worth climbing only if owners have a reason to; Ries and Trout's own warning is to look for the hole in the prospect's mind, not in the factory. This one has a price on it. A two-practitioner clinic books 40 appointments a day at $80. At 12% no-shows it loses 40 × 12% × $80 × 22 working days ≈ $8,450 a month. The scheduler's reminder sequence, which texts each patient and lets them confirm, cancel or rebook by reply, takes no-shows to 5%. That recovers 40 × 7% × $80 × 22 ≈ $4,900 a month for $99.
A map shows the same hole. Asked of each option "Does this cut no-shows?", 84 of 200 owners said yes for phoning the day before, 60 for the suite, whose single reminder email sits among dozens of modules, and 24 for the $29 tool, which sends none. Nothing sits in the upper half of the map, at any price.
The hole is a word: "no-shows". Ries and Trout's later The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (1993) compresses positioning into owning one word in the prospect's mind, as Volvo owned "safety". "No-shows" is the word owners already use when they count the loss, so only the answer needs teaching. Dunford's method reaches the same category from the other end, starting with the demos the scheduler wins.
Repositioning the competitor
The book's third move is to reposition the incumbents: give the buyer a fact that changes how they see the name on the rung. Its example is the pain reliever sold "for the millions who should not take aspirin", which made aspirin's side effects the frame.
For the scheduler the honest version is one sentence: a calendar records a no-show; the scheduler prevents one. It files both incumbents on the calendar ladder and leaves the no-show ladder to the scheduler. It works only if it is true. If the suite's reminder email cut no-shows as much, a two-week trial would show it, and the line would cost the scheduler its credibility rather than the suite. A repositioning has to survive the competitor's best customer reading it.
Measuring whether you own the word
Re-run the unaided question every six months: "Name a product that cuts no-shows." On an empty ladder any first mention is rung 1, so what matters is whether the count grows beyond the customers.
The beachhead arithmetic aims for 400 of one region's 4,000 clinics, one in ten, so a 200-owner sample there holds about 20 customers, who name the scheduler anyway. A count of 20 varies by about √20 ≈ 4.5 between surveys, the noise rule from the five decisions, so 30 or more means the word is reaching owners who are not customers yet. At 20 or below, the scheduler owns a customer list, not a word.
In practice
Hand the copywriters, agency or team, the survey rather than adjectives: two names on the scheduling ladder, none on the no-show ladder, and a brief to put the scheduler's name on the second. The homepage, the demo opening and the trial's first email all say "no-shows"; a company that says "scheduling" on the homepage and "no-shows" in the demo owns neither. To the board, the six-monthly recall count is the positioning metric, reported beside the customer count it has to beat.
The mistake that costs money is buying reach for a claim on a rung somebody else owns. "The best scheduling software for clinics" asks 140 of 200 owners to give up the name they learned first, and every dollar behind it is spent arguing with their memory.
Check yourself
1. Six months later the $29 tool has added a single reminder text. Asked to name a product that cuts no-shows, 30 of 200 owners name the tool and 22 name the scheduler. Is the hole lost?
Not yet. A count of 30 varies by about √30 ≈ 5.5, so a gap of 8 is under two of those widths and neither owns the rung. Put the proof where the claim is, the clinic's own no-show rate falling from 12% to 5%, against one text the day before. If the tool is still ahead by more than two widths next time, it owns the word and the scheduler needs another hole.
2. The board likes the Avis case and wants the headline "The $99 alternative to the $400 suite". By the survey's numbers, do you approve it?
No. Defining yourself against rung 1 works when rung 2 is free, and the $29 tool already holds it as the cheap alternative to the suite, named first by 45 of 200 owners; at $99 the scheduler would be the dearer challenger. The headline also aims at suite users, the prospects it wins least often. On the no-show ladder one first mention is rung 1.
3. An agency proposes calling the suite "bloated" in the next campaign. Approve or reject?
Reject. A repositioning hands the buyer a checkable fact that makes the new ladder make sense. "Bloated" is an opinion, it argues on the suite's ladder rather than the no-show one, and suite users are the prospects the scheduler wins least often. "A calendar records a no-show; the scheduler prevents one" does the job, and a two-week trial proves it.