To cope with the product explosion, people have learned to rank products and brands in the mind and perhaps this can be based visualized by imagining a series of ladders in the mind, and on each row is a brand each different ladder represents a different product category. Some ladders have many steps (seven is me) and others have few, if any, is a competitor that wants to increase its share of the business must either dislodge the brand above (a task that is usually impossible) or somehow relate its brand to the other companies position.

Too many companies embark on marketing and advertising campaigns as if the competitor’s position did not exist and this strategy seldom works, as they advertise their products in a vacuum and are disappointed when their messages failed to get through. Moving up the ladder in the mind can be extremely difficult if they prance about have a strong foothold and no leverage or positioning strategy is applied.

The positioning strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder and your marketing strategy should depend on how soon you got into the mind and consequently which rung of the ladder you occupy, the higher the better, of course. The mind is selective and prospects use their ladders in deciding which information to accept and which information to reject, and in general, and mind accepts only new data that is consistent with its product ladder in that category, and everything else is ignored.

The ladder is a simple, but powerful analogy and can help you deal with the critical issues in marketing, but before starting any marketing program, ask yourself which ladder are we on, where are we on the ladder in the prospects mind, on the top rung, on the second rung, or are we not on the ladder at all.

Positioning is counter to classic marketing thinking, which is brand oriented, as in how I get people to prefer my brand, but forget the brand and think categories. Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands and everyone talks about why their brand is better, but prospects have an open mind when it comes to Kate’s, as everyone is interested in what’s new and few people are interested in what is better.

Early on, a new category is a matter of many rungs (seven is many), and in the long run, every market becomes a two horse race, and this is known as the law of duality. In photographic film, it is Kodak and Fuji, and in hamburgers, it is McDonalds and Burger King. In colas, it is Coke and Pepsi, and in sneakers, it is Nike and Reebok. In toothpaste, it is Crest and Colgate, and in long-distance, it is AT&T and MCI. Successful marketers concentrate on the top to rungs and Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric, said “Only businesses that are number one or number two in their markets could win in the increasingly competitive global arena. Those that could not were fixed, closed, or sold.”

Over time, a category will divide into can two or more categories and like an amoeba dividing in any petri dish, the marketing arena can be viewed as an ever expanding sea of categories, and a category starts off as a single entity, as in computers. But over time the category breaks up into other segments including mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, personal computers, laptops, notebooks, Palm computers, etc., and instead of understanding this concept of division, many business leaders hold the belief that categories are combining. But it won’t happen, as categories are dividing not combining.

An entrepreneur who wants to introduce a new product category must carry in a new ladder and this, too, is difficult, especially if the new category is not positioned against an old one, as the mind has no room for what is new and different unless it is related to the old. That’s why if you have a truly new product, it is often better to tell the prospect what the product is not, rather than what it is, as the first automobile, for example, was called the “horseless” carriage. Words like “off-track” betting, “lead-free” gasoline, “sugar free” soda, and “wireless” Internet connections are all examples of how new concepts can be positioned against the old.

Due to the existence of ladders in the mind, there are only a few generic external positioning strategies you can employ including getting into the mind first or finding the niche, positioning yourself to the leader, or repositioning the competition.