Why this book matters
Many people file Positioning under marketing. It lives on CMO bookshelves, gets taught in business schools, and a lot of practitioners in our field have never picked it up because they assume it’s about selling consumer products.
But I think it belongs in the public affairs canon. So much of what we do is positioning — positioning an issue so it occupies a specific mental slot before a competitor gets there, positioning our organization so a minister thinks of us first, positioning a specific policy ask so it’s hard to oppose, etc.
We did a lot of that in the Prime Minister’s Office, making sure every piece of legislation had a title that would make it politically painful for the opposition to vote against. It works.
Ries and Trout’s core diagnosis is that the mind doesn’t receive information neutrally. It defends against it. It screens out what doesn’t match existing beliefs, ranks what gets through into simplified hierarchies, and anchors hard on whoever gets there first.
The decision maker already has a picture in their head. If the brief doesn’t fit that picture, the mind doesn’t update. It filters.
In 20 years of practice, the pattern I’ve seen more often than any other is teams that lead with their cognitive argument — strong data, sound logic, clear recommendations — and expect the quality of the evidence to carry the day. It almost never works the way we expect it to.
Ries and Trout explain why, and they offer a disciplined alternative: start with the prospect’s mind, figure out what’s already there, and build your position around that reality instead of against it.
What We Cover in This Episode
- How the mind filters, ranks, and anchors information — and what that means for how we design campaigns
- Why leading with facts and cognitive arguments is the most common pattern in public affairs and the least effective
- Naming as a strategic weapon — lessons from the PMO on legislative titles and policy framing
- The coalition dilution trap: how the instinct to build consensus often destroys the sharpness of your position
- Why the public assesses your issues against their own self-identity before deciding whether to support you — a blind spot the book itself underexplores
- The Avis, Tylenol, Xerox, and Taster’s Choice case studies
- Connections to Lippmann’s stereotypes, McRaney’s identity-protective cognition, Luntz’s language discipline, and Centola’s threshold dynamics
- Four mental models worth carrying around: the Ladder, the Créneau, the Teeter-Totter, and Sacrifice
Bonus: ideas that didn’t make the episode
1. The mind works aurally first
They go further and suggest that messages designed for print should be written as if they were designed for radio first.
Ries and Trout make a point that most communicators overlook entirely. The mind processes language as sound, even when reading. You learn to speak before you learn to read, and the brain never fully loses that priority. Every name, headline, slogan, and policy title should be tested for how it sounds, not just how it reads.
2. The no-name trap
If your audience has to decode your name before they can place you, good luck.
The book has a long section on organisations that rely on initials instead of words. Their rule is straightforward: people invariably use words over initials when both are equal in length. You have to be extremely well known before initials work — GE triggers “General Electric” because the company is already deeply embedded. For everyone else, initials are just noise. For public affairs practitioners, the lesson extends to coalition names, campaign titles, and organizational abbreviations.
3. Transparency of origin as a positioning strategy
There’s a fascinating passage about margarine. Ries and Trout argue that the word “margarine” is deceptive because it hides what the product actually is. Everyone knows butter comes from milk. Nobody knows what margarine comes from. And because the origin is hidden, prospects assume something must be wrong. Their proposed fix: call it “soy butter.” Deliberately polarise the situation with an honest name, and then build a long-term programme around the real advantages.
You can’t build a durable position on a foundation the public doesn’t trust.
When organizations obscure who they are, who funds them, or what they’re actually asking for, the public’s instinct is suspicion. Transparency of origin is both ethically and strategically sound.
4. The covering strategy and why it fails internally
Ries and Trout describe a counterintuitive move for leaders: when a competitor introduces something new, the leader should adopt it immediately rather than dismissing it. Swallow your pride and cover every new development that shows promise. But they add that the “pure covering move is often difficult to sell internally. Management often sees the new product or service as a competitor rather than as an opportunity.”
The people closest to the existing strategy see the new position as a threat, not territory to claim.
This maps directly onto how incumbent organizations respond to disruptive policy positions. A well-positioned industry leader should co-opt emerging positions rather than oppose them. But the internal politics of most organizations make that move almost impossible to execute.
5. Positions compound over time
One of the quieter themes in the book is patience. Ries and Trout argue that “a successful positioning programme requires a major long-term commitment by the people in charge, whether it’s the head of a corporation, a church, an airline, or a country. In a constantly changing political environment, this is difficult to accomplish.”
“Difficult to accomplish” is the understatement of the book. In a world that rewards novelty and punishes repetition, holding the same position year after year is rare. It’s also the only way positions compound. Every time you reinforce the same position, you drive it deeper. Every time you change it, you start from scratch.