Poisoning solves the dangerous Grime of Being in the wrong place at the Right Time, Developed to find ways of finding room for new products in highly developed markets, poisoning became a major educative concept in the world's developing markets.



The poisoning concept challenges an idea that is the heart and soul of the advertising community: that the primary function of advertising is to communicate. ?Tell more, sell more? was the old advertising motto.

Advertising is not communication; advertising is poisoning. The best advertising communicates little concerning the product or service. What the best advertising does, however, is to set up and support a position in the customer's mind.

Marketing people used to talk about the 4 P's: price, product, promotion, place. Now they talk about the 5 P's, the original four plus positioning. And no company could begin a new brand without first writing a positioning. When you study these poisoning statements, you can distinguish where marketing people have gotten off track in general.

They are written from the company's point of view. We want to position our brand as the premier product in the category. What's wrong with a positioning statement like this? Everything. It leaves the customer out of the equation. A positioning statement need be made from the customer's point of view: There's an open hole in the mind for a premium product in the category.

The Open Hole

Price is the easiest hole in the mind to understand and it's one of the easiest holes to fill.

Haagen-Dazes decision to introduce a more pricy line of ice cream set up the ?premium? ice-cream position for the brand and made Haagen-Dazs one of thelong-termmarketing successes of the past several decades.

What Haagen-Dazs did in ice cream, Heineken did in beer. It was the first brand to occupy the high-priced beer position in the mind.

Then the people at Anheuser-Busch decidedthat if Heineken was the first high-priced imported beer, then they could occupy the position as the first high-priced imported beer, a position that the Anheuser-Busch Michelob brand occupies today.

High price is only one of the open holes in the mind. Low price is another. What Haagen-Dazs Heineken and Mercedes did at the high end, brands like Wal-Mart and South west Airlines have done at the low end.

Minds can change. Stolichnaya was the first vodka to occupy the high-priced position in the mind. As time went on and the Cold War heated up, Americans were turned off by a Russian vodka like Stolichnaya. So Absolute moved smartly into the high-priced vodka position. Today Absolute outsells Stolichnaya in the US by about three to one.

How many price holes are there in a typical mind? It depends on the category. In general there are three: the regular brand, the low priced brand and the high-priced brand. When you own 3 brands that occupy all three positions, you can be said to win the Triple Crown of Branding.

Anheuser-Busch, for instance, has Busch, the largest-selling, low?priced beer; Budweiser, the largest-selling regular beer; and Michelob, the largest-selling high-priced beer.

In some categories, there is room for an ?ultra high-priced? brand. Today, Grey Goose Vodka, for instance, is growing faster than Absolut and is not far behind Stolichnaya in sales, and is sure to pass the Russian brand sometime in the future.

?Country of origin? is another clear hole in the mind. Toyota was the first to fill the Japanese imported-car hole and became the leading brand. They did it once more with Lexus, which became the leading high-priced Japanese automobile brand.

Some consultants have called this positioning strategy, ?the first-mover advantage,? but that is not so. It's an advantage, but it's not the reason that most leader brands got to be leader.

It's the ?first minder? advantage. That is, the brand that gets into the mind first is the winner, not necessarily the brand that is first in the category. For instance, Duryea was the first automobile on the road, but never got into the mind. Ford was the first automobile in the mind.

The New Category

Sometimes there are no open holes in the customer's mind and you have to create one. We label this positioning strategy; ?create a new category you can be first in.? Gatorade, for instance, was the first sports drink. Developed in the 1960s by a team of doctors to add the Gators football team at the University of Florida the band now does over $2 billion in worldwide sales.

PowerBar was the first energy bar and now lead this fast growing market. Some critics, of course, think this is just wordplay. PowerBar to them is just a candy bar with a different name to help users diminish their guilt feelings about eating a candy bar.

Possibly there is little actual difference between a candy bar and a powerBar, but not so in the mind. users consider them to be two different categories.

The Number-two Brand

Users want alternative. At times you can build a powerful brand just by giving users an choice to the leading brand.

But what plan can best deliver the number-two position? Possibly if we can produce a improved product than the leader,? goes the thinking. ?we won't necessarily overtake them, but we will wind up in the number two position.?

This is the worst possible approach for a customer live number two brand why? For the reason that the better product cannot win in the marketplace even if users expect it to prevail. As a matter of fact, there is a strong axiom, or belief, in the minds of users that ?the best product or service prevailin the marketplace.?

While everyone believes that the better product will prevail in the marketplace, the worst possible plan for any company is to endeavour to produce a ?improved product.? Why is this so? Because the leader in your field has already created the perception of producing the improved product.

If you endeavour to claim that your product is superior, the customer thinks, ?No, it can't be superior; otherwise it would be the leader.? Yet what do most companies endeavour to do? They try to (1) produce a superior product and (2) communicate that difference to customers and customers. While it's easy to do (1), it's almost impossible to do (2).

Is Royal Grown cola a superior tasting cola than coca-cola? Royal Grown thinks so and their research shows that 57% of customers prefer the test of Royal Crown cola to coca-cola Classic. That's a pretty big difference.

But, the better tasting cola (Royal Grown) has only two per cent of the cola market. What they need to do, you might be thinking, is to communicate that difference. Well they've tried that and it doesn't work. ?That can't be,? the customer thinks. ?If Royal Crown were the better-tasting cola, it would be the leader, not coke. There have got to be something wrong with the research.?

Essentially, the Royal crown company hired an independent research organization to perform 1000000 taste tests comparing its product with Coca-cola. Would 10.000.000 tastes tests have made a difference?

No. You believe what you want to believe and if you believe that the improved product prevailin the marketplace, then you think coca-cola have got to be the improved product because it is the leader. Then how do you become a strong number-two brand? You become the opposite of the leader.

Coca-cola is the old, established brand which means that your parents drank coca-cola. So Pepsi-cola said, ?You don't want to drink what your parents drank, you're the Pepsi Generation.?

The Specialist

Every coffee shop in American sells coffee, but they also sell hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, apple pie, doughnuts, and dozens of other foods and beverages. So Starbucks specialized in coffee and became a very successful brand. So did McDonald's, which specialized in hamburgers.

And Dunkin? Donuts which specialized in doughnuts. And subway which specialized in submarine sandwiches. The largest air-cargo company in America was Emery Air Freight. What Kind of services did Emery offer?

Everything ? large packages, mall packages, overnight delivery, inexpensive two ? and three ? day deliveries. So Federal Express specialized in ?small packages, overnight? and became a much more successful brand than Emery. Enterprise Rent-Car specialized in the ?insurance replacement? business and became the largest car-rental company in America.

The Channel Brand

Hanes was the largest-Selling Panty-hose brand in department stores in America, but Hanes had a challenge. Women were not shopping at department stores often enough. Hence the company wanted to expandits distribution.

Supermarkets were the rational alternative. (Women visit a supermarket almost two times a week.) Hence Hanes developed a 2ndbrand for supermarket distribution only. The ?L'eggs? name was particularly good alternative because it was a double entendre (legs and eggs).

To support the name, the product was packaged in a plastic container that appeared like an egg. L'eggs, the first supermarket panty-hose brand, became the largest-selling panty-hose brand in the country.

The Gender Brand

Sometimes you can establish a brand by focusing on half the market. Marlboro became a big brand by positioning itself as the first cigarette for men. Virginia slims became a big brand by positioning itself as the first cigarette for women. Right Card became a big brand by positioning itself as the first deodorant for men.

The ?Bad Name? Problem

Complicating the search for an open hole in the mind is the issue of the name. You can't put a square peg in a round hole and you can't fill a hole in the mind with a bad, or inappropriate, name.

Ralph Lifshitz was a young fashion designer in New York who aimed at better thing. Hence he changed his name to Ralph Lauren and made his Polo brand into the most successful fashion brand in the world. Could he have completed his goal with the name polo Ralph Lifshitz? Not at all.

Many Asian names will not work outside of Asia. Names like Daewoo, Daihatsu and Matsushita are difficult to pronounce and hard to spell outside of Asia. When the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo company started to market its products in the US, the company alteredits name to Sony. A good move. Many Asian companies that want to establish worldwide brands will have to do the same.

The ?One Name, Two Holes? Problem

Then there is the problem of endeavoring to use alikename to fill two different holes. Xerox, the leading brand of office copier, endeavoured to go in the mainframe computer market with the Xerox name. It was a tragedy. Are there successful examples of line extension? Sure, however these normally happen in weak markets where no single brand prevails the category.

Or they happen with weak brands with little identity in their categories. Meaning, if your brand doesn't stand for anything in one category, you can move it to another category where it won't stand for anything either.

The ?Moving-the-Hole? Problem

Some Companies think they can alter what their brands represent. So Volkswagen is attempting to sell a hundred thousand US dollar automobile called the Phaeton. And Mercedes-Benz is attempting to sell $20,000 A-class Vehicles.

You can deepen a hole, you can broaden a hole, but the one thing you can't do with a hole is move it. When a brand is firmly established in the mind, it can on the odd occasion, if ever, be moved to a new location.

You can't go wrong, but, if you take your mind off your product, your brand, and your company and focus instead on the mind of the consumer. That's where you can win and that's where you can also lose.