Positioning

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind Al Ries and Jack Trout

--- The Avis rent-a-car company has lost money for thirteen consecutive years. The management has tried everything: new fleet, better service desks, revised pricing. Nothing works. Not because the cars are bad or the staff is lazy. It fails because Hertz is sitting at the top of the mind and Avis is not.

Then the agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, walks into the room with something nobody expected. Not a product campaign. Not a price comparison. A sentence: *"Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder."*

In year one, Avis posts a $1.2 million profit. In year two, $2.6 million. In year three, $5 million.

Nothing changed about the cars. Nothing changed about the counters or the lot locations or the pricing. The only thing that changed was the idea that lived in the customer's head. Avis stopped fighting the product war and started fighting the perception war. It named its position on the mental ladder rather than denying it. It said: we are second, and because we are second, we work harder for you. That single act of honesty about position generated more commercial momentum than any product improvement they could have made.

This is positioning. Not what you do to a product. What you do to a mind.

The story did not end well, and that is also instructive. After Avis was sold to ITT, the new management decided it no longer wanted to be "only No. 2." They ran a campaign announcing that Avis was going to be No. 1. The customers already knew Avis was not No. 1. The new campaign said nothing true and abandoned the one thing that had lodged in the mind. Sales stalled. The brand wandered for years through variations: "Avis is going to try even harder," "Wizards of Avis," forgettable tagline after forgettable tagline. What people remember today, four decades later, is still "We try harder." The original positioning outlasted every attempt to replace it.