Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

­­Spencer Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese? and co-author of The One Minute Manager

"...Ries and Trout taught me everything I know about branding, marketing, and product management. When I had the idea of creating a very large thematic community on the Web, I first thought of Positioning...."

­­David Bohnett, Chairman and Founder of GeoCities

The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a "position" in a prospective customer's mind-one that reflects a company's own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. Writing in their trademark witty, fast-paced style, advertising gurus Ries and Trout explain how to:

• Make and position an industry leader so that its name and message wheedles its way into the collective subconscious of your market-and stays there
• Position a follower so that it can occupy a niche not claimed by the leader
• Avoid letting a second product ride on the coattails of an established one.

Positioning also shows you how to:

• Use leading ad agency techniques to capture the biggest market share and become a household name
• Build your strategy around your competition's weaknesses
• Reposition a strong competitor and create a weak spot
• Use your present position to its best advantage
• Choose the best name for your product
• Determine when-and why-less is more
• Analyze recent trends that affect your positioning.

Ries and Trout provide many valuable case histories and penetrating analyses of some of the most phenomenal successes and failures in advertising history. Revised to reflect significant developments in the five years since its original publication, Positioning is required reading for anyone in business today.

Chapter 1. What Positioning Is All About.

Chapter 2. The Assault on the Mind.

Chapter 3. Getting Into the Mind.

Chapter 4. Those Little Ladders in Your Head.

Chapter 5. You Can't Get There From Here.

Chapter 6. Positioning of a Leader.

Chapter 7. Positioning of a Follower.

Chapter 8. Repositioning the Competition.

Chapter 9. The Power of the Name.

Chapter 10. The No-Name Trap.

Chapter 11. The Free-Ride Trap.

Chapter 12. The Line-Extension Trap.

Chapter 13. When Line Extension Can Work.

Chapter 14. Positioning a Company: Xerox.

Chapter 15. Positioning a Country: Belgium.

Chapter 16. Positioning an Island: Jamaica.

Chapter 17. Positioning a Product: Milk Duds.

Chapter 18. Positioning a Service: Mailgram.

Chapter 19. Positioning a Long Island Bank.

Chapter 20. Positioning a New Jersey Bank.

Chapter 21. Positioning a Ski Resort: Stowe.

Chapter 22. Positioning the Catholic Church.

Chapter 23. Positioning Yourself and Your Career.

Chapter 24. Positioning Your Business.

Chapter 25. Playing the Positioning Game.