Here’s the thing most people get wrong about positioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They think it started in 1972.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It didn’t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1972 is when the word got famous. The thing the word points to is older than the word by a long way. Confuse the two, and you end up with the common dismissal: “It’s just an advertising theory from 1972.” Demote the label, demote the underlying mechanism, walk away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s a category error. So let’s slow down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The naming story is small and human, and it matters because people keep getting it wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Al Ries ran a small New York agency in the 1960s called Ries Cappiello Colwell. He’d been thinking about a problem his clients kept hitting: how do you stand out in a category full of look-alikes? He called his answer “the rock.” Every brand, he said, needed a solid rock to stand on so it could be told apart from everyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jack Trout worked for Al as an account executive at the agency. One day, Jack suggested calling the rock something else. Call it a “position.” Al agreed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jack then wrote the first article on it himself, alone. Industrial Marketing<\/em>, June 1969, titled “Positioning is a game people play in today’s me-too marketplace”<\/a>. Three years later, in 1972, Al and Jack together wrote the three-part series “The Positioning Era”<\/a> in Advertising Age<\/em>. Nine years after that, in 1981, they published Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind<\/em> together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jack later said this about the word: “I chose the word ‘Positioning’ because of that dictionary definition of strategy: finding the most advantageous position against the enemy.”<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n So the lineage is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s the naming event. Now let’s look at what was already running underneath it, in four different disciplines, decades before either of them sat down with a typewriter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s the question worth asking first: What is positioning, actually, when you strip the advertising paint off it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s the answer to a behavioural question. When a buyer is about to choose, what comes to mind first, and why?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That question doesn’t belong to advertising. It belongs to memory, attention, category formation, choice under uncertainty, market structure, and buying habits. Each of those has its own discipline, its own evidence base, and its own pre-1972 history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Four disciplines converged on the same answer at roughly the same time. None of them was talking to each other. They all arrived at the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George Miller, Harvard, 1956. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two<\/em>. Working memory holds about seven items at a time. Nelson Cowan later revised that down to three to five for the central capacity. Either way, the ceiling is low.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does that mean for a buyer? In any category they can name, they can hold a small set of brands in mind without effort. Everyone else is invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don’t compete inside the buyer’s full awareness. You compete inside that small set. That’s the first mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eleanor Rosch, Berkeley, 1970s. Categories don’t have hard edges. They have centres. A robin is a “more bird” bird than an ostrich. People judge new things against the central example, not against a list of rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does that mean for a buyer? They don’t choose by a feature checklist. They choose the option that feels most like the centre of the category. Whoever owns the centre owns the category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s the second mechanism. And it predates Ries and Trout by a decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
The mechanism was already there<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I. The brain only has so much room<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
II. The brain doesn’t sort cleanly<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
III. The brain shortcuts under uncertainty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n