Positioning: a Battle for Your Mind Book Report

Title: Positioning: The battle for Your Mind

Author: Al Ries & Jack Trout

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Year: 1981, 2001

Author Creditability: According to Wikipedia.com, Al Ries is a marketing professional and author. He was selected as one of the most influential people in the field of public relations in the 20th century by PR Week magazine in 1999. Ries has also written a number of books that have made the Business Week best seller list on a number of occasions. Along with Jack Trout, Al Ries coined the term "positioning", as related to the field of marketing. Trout started his business career in the advertising department of General Electric. From there he went on to become a divisional advertising manager at Uniroyal. Then he joined Al Ries in the advertising agency and marketing strategy firm where they worked together for over twenty-six years.

Book Review

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind was written by Al Ries and Jack Trout as a new approach to marketing. They highlight the fact that our world is over communicated today and that we focus too heavily on the product and not the prospect we are selling the product to. Ideally, the purpose of this book is to get people to communicate via positioning of the product in the prospect’s mind. Instead, some of us still simply throw marketable attributes about the product out there and hope they stick. The overwhelming theme of the book is that when dealing with communication, less is more.

Some very interesting statistics are discussed early in the book to validate the excessive communication that goes on in America. As a country, we consume 57% of the world’s advertising, 30,000 books are published each year, and 98% of American homes have at least one television set. This also contributes to the 5,000 new products that are introduced to our market each year. Being that this book is several years old, I researched some of these numbers on the internet and found that the number of books...