« Blowfly: adapting open source to the beer business |
Main
| Worth A Read... »
July 05, 2005
Positioning wars...
Posted by Johnnie Moore
Very good article by Jay Rosen, about media coverage of the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice in the US. He suggests that two sides are preparing to do battle in a way that seems to be about activists battering away at each other without noticing that they're not likely to achieve much. Here's a snippet:
Reaching for her cliché gun, Robin Toner can say "nothing less than a national political campaign had begun," but she has no idea how it's supposed to work, either. Everyone parades around as if this mobilization of opposing armies makes perfect political sense, when in fact "all the time and money spent on campaigns may have little influence on the outcome."
Why does this go on? One reason is that activist groups, by opposing each other, use each other for mutual self-definition. They too don't know how their e-mail blasts and TV ads are supposed to work. Like spammers, they just send the stuff out. What they know is that the other side will be sending e-mail blasts and running TV ads. Spam must meet spam.
I don't want to dwell on US politics in this blog, but I think what Rosen sees here is a kind of folly that marketing folks often get trapped by: obsessing with positioning and defining themselves against their perceived competitors, rather than focussing on expressing their own views or (heaven help us) thinking whether any of these campaigns really touch the customer.
(Cross posted from my own blog)
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Brand Practice
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › They Say Things...
- › Lafley On Marketing
- › Kryptonite Is Back
- › Participate in the Reputation Marketplace
- › Create More Satisfied Non-Customers
- › Innovation
- › You, Called the Brand
- › Just Words
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
