10 Essential Direct Response Marketing Frameworks

Creative entrepreneurs frequently have an addiction with creating amazing products or services. Unfortunately the best product or service doesn’t win, only the product or service with the best marketing. Does this mean mean that a lesser quality product can outsell a higher quality product 9 times out of 10 simply due to marketing? Yes.

This is slightly depressing news for us creative entrepreneurs. It came as a realization for me, personally, and I had to see it play out before I really understood the concept. As it turns out the power of the product comes directly from the mind of the prospect, so it’s really a matter of working backwards from the end goal to the product creation.

In Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout provide a number of essential frameworks. Here’s 10 Essential Marketing Frameworks from Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind:

1. Your product quality doesn’t matter. This is the most important marketing framework.
2. To become a positioning leader you must get there firstest with the mostest.
3. History & science prove again and again that the first into the human mind, on average, gets twice the long-term marketshare of the Number 2 brand, and twice again as much as the Number 3 brand. These relationships are not easily changed.
4. Never think the power is derived from the power of your brand. It’s just the reverse.The power of the brand is derived from the power of the product, or, the position that the product owns in the mind of the prospect.
5. Adopt a single-position strategy. Never introduce another product under your brand. One brand can only be known for one thing, never two or more. Always re-brand to maintain new positioning in the mind of the prospect. A multi-brand strategy is really a single-position strategy.
6. To win in todays competitive environment, you have to go out and make friends and carve out a specific niche in the market. Even if you lose a few doing so.
7. The chances of finding a hole in the market is very slim. The best response? Reposition the competition.
8. Never be afraid to conflict. The crux of repositioning is undercutting an existing concept, product or person. Conflict can build a reputation overnight.
9. For a repositioning strategy to work, you must say something about your competitors product that causes the prospect to change his mind, not about your product, but about the competitors product.
10. To position effectively, state reality in plain english in terms and language the prospect understands and agrees with.

Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind is a book written by Al Ries and Jack Trout. This book defined a new approach to communication, and may have defined the new era of marketing called “Positioning”. This is a book is as much about marketing as it is human psychology.