Dave McNally Photography

By David McNally

Many would have you think that mar­ket­ing in the 21st cen­tury is all about find­ing new ways to com­mu­ni­cate with consumers. Indeed, the method­ol­ogy of com­mu­ni­ca­tion has gone through some excit­ing improve­ments in the last decade.

However, as mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive Doug Stone points out in an arti­cle writ­ten in the last cen­tury (Stone, 1995), the “Old Rules Still Apply: 5 Com­mand­ments of Positioning.”

Stone writes about the down­side of fail­ing to posi­tion a prod­uct. “Posi­tion not and you shall be posi­tioned — by oth­ers,” he said.

In prepar­ing for a suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing strat­egy, the posi­tion process is key. Marketers must first research the mar­ket to iden­tify a rel­e­vant set of com­pet­i­tive products.

Fail­ure to do this impor­tant step may ulti­mately lead to over­all fail­ure. Nowhere is this more evi­dent than in the recent death spi­ral of indus­try icon Palm. The tech com­pany once set the stan­dard for devel­op­ing the per­sonal dig­i­tal assis­tant mar­ket. Sales plum­meted and ana­lysts panned the company’s finan­cial future. Hewlett Packard pur­chased Palm last month.

Palm, Inc. had high hopes that its prod­uct would com­pete head-on with the Apple iPhone when it released its new smart phone in June 2009.

But it was not to be.

Palm adver­tis­ing agency Modemista pro­duced a mar­ket­ing cam­paign that didn’t work. “The now-infamous “Flow” cam­paign fea­tured Chi­nese dancers and a cen­tral female char­ac­ter largely described in the blo­gos­phere as creepy,” writes Kunur Patel for Adver­tis­ing Age.

“What it didn’t do was demon­strate the pow­er­ful capa­bil­i­ties of the device like, say, Apple’s “Meet iPad” ads did this spring.”

Palm may have iden­ti­fied com­pet­ing prod­ucts, but its fail­ure to sell prod­ucts may not have been the mar­ket­ing exec­u­tives fault.

“Palm asked the mar­ket­ing to do too much,” said one ad exec­u­tive famil­iar with the account. “You need to pick one of two bat­tles: launch­ing a new hand­set, or some­thing big­ger, like [show­ing] how mobile can be used in your life.”

Stone writes that effec­tive mar­keters must “know their tar­get cus­tomer as they know them­selves.” This applies directly to the impor­tant step of “col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion from a sam­ple of cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers about per­cep­tions of each prod­uct on the deter­mi­nant attributes.”

“What do they long for,” writes Stone. This is a crit­i­cal mind­set to iden­tify how to sell a prod­uct. The mar­ket­ing man­ager must achieve the crit­i­cal con­sumer perspective.

Stone also give mar­ket­ing peo­ple a taste of real­ity. “Be only what you can be,” he writes. This meshes neatly with “deter­min­ing a product’s posi­tion­ing in the prod­uct space and inten­sity thereof.”

In the end, no mat­ter how well writ­ten a posi­tion­ing state­ment or value propo­si­tion may be, the prod­uct must make a per­ceived dif­fer­ence in the life of the con­sumer. If not, no mar­ket­ing strat­egy will be strong enough to make a difference.

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Stone, D. (1995, Sep­tem­ber 11). Old rules still apply: 5 com­mand­ments of posi­tion­ing.
Nation’s Restau­rant News, p. 32. Retrieved from Busi­ness Source Pre­mier
database

Patel, K.. (2010, April). How Palm missed
with mar­ket­ing, and how it plans to revive itself. Adver­tis­ing Age, 81(14),
1,20. Retrieved May 3, 2010, from
ABI/INFORM Global. (Doc­u­ment ID: 2007092131).