Positioning summary

If your concept is the first in the customers’ minds, they will most likely adopt it. For instance, Coca Cola was promoted as the most successful soft drink in the market and has stayed in that position for decades.

Our tendency is to always remember what we see or hear first in a category, while additional products in the same category are harder to recall.

So you created a product you want to sell. Now how do you get people to remember it? The key is knowing your market and finding a marketing angle that sticks.

First of all, to determine the most effective positioning for your product, you need to think about the current market trends.

Ideally, you want your product to be the first in the marketplace. However, if someone else has already beat you to it, you’ll need to know how to successfully market a follow-up product. This isn’t easy, but it’s possible.

If your product is a follower of an established brand, it will have to fight to be recognized. Even if your product is better, customers will still not trust secondary products.

When a brand becomes hugely successful, it’s tempting to cash in on it by marketing something similar, or “taking a free ride.” But although this seems like an easy way to get noticed, it doesn’t mean that customers will automatically trust your product.

Long-time market leader Coca-Cola tried this by introducing Mr. Pibb, a follow-up product of a rival company’s Dr. Pepper, and failed miserably. Even Coke’s position as a leader in soft drink products couldn’t make Mr. Pibb successful.

It goes without saying that your brand name should be impactful and memorable, as this will be the name your customers hang on their metaphorical product ladder. But what exactly makes a good brand name?

An old strategy was to choose a fancy, uncommon word for your brand name, like the young men’s magazine Esquire did.