Strive Notes

There is a popular tech PR blog called, …the world’s leading…  The name pokes fun at all those PR people who position their clients that way in news releases and other promotional copy.  And, there are thousands of them; so probably more than little fun poking is in order.

But correct positioning is an important part of corporate writing and it takes a lot of thought and planning to get it right.  The goal is to get the reader to let your brand/idea/ product into their consciousness and then to stay there.

To get the right positioning, you need to analyse the market, identify unmet needs or  particular niches that the competition has missed.  That means not everyone can be “…the world’s leading…” And, you shouldn’t want to be.

It’s far more effective to find the right position, instead of the leading position. Being first to market makes this a bit easier because you are dealing with a blank slate. But that’s not always enough, as our friends at Netscape could attest.

In today’s over-communicated society, you have to find ways to work around the complexity of choice and information available to people. The human mind deals with this complexity by automatically categorising information and ranking the communicators in order of importance, according to their needs.  The trick is to influence how information is categorised so that your information receives the highest mental ranking.

So if the leadership position of your market is already occupied, find a weakness of the occupier to exploit.  North American Strivers will remember ‘The Uncola’ and ‘Medicine Breath’ as early successes of this strategy in advertising.  A more recent example is the Mac v PC ad currently running on Technorati.  Mac’s cool is positioned against PC’s old-fashioned image. Everyone wants to be cool right?

So shouldn’t their news releases read: “Mac, provider of the world’s coolest home computers, announced today…”?

It’s a bit silly, but you get the point.  Creative positioning is crucial to corporate communications success.

Filed under: public relations