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 Most
people believe that working hard is the secret of success. Al Ries
and Jack Trout explain why working smart is the better way
If positioning strategies can be used to promote
a product, why can’t they be used to promote yourself? No
reason at all. So let’s review positioning theory as it might
apply to your own personal career.
Define yourself
What are you? People suffer from the same disease
as products. They try to be all things to all people. The problem
with this approach is the mind of the prospect. It’s difficult
enough to link one concept with each product. It’s almost
impossible with two or three or more concepts.
The most difficult part of positioning is selecting
that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if
you want to cut through the prospect’s wall of indifference.
What are you? What is your own position in life? If you sum up your
own position in a single concept? Then can you run your own career
to establish and exploit that position?
Most people aren’t ruthless enough to set
up a single concept for themselves. They vacillate. They expect
others to do it for them.
“I’m the best lawyer in Dallas.”
Are you? How often would your name be mentioned
if we took a survey of the Dallas legal community?
“I’m the best lawyer in Dallas”
is a position that can be achieved with some talent, some luck and
a lot of strategy. And, the first step is to isolate the concept
that you are going to use to establish that long-term position.
It’s not easy. But the rewards can be great.
Make mistakes
Anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing
lousy. If it wasn’t worthwhile doing, you shouldn’t
have done it at all.
On the other hand, if it is worthwhile doing
and you wait until you can do it perfectly, if you procrastinate,
you run the risk of not doing it ever.
Therefore, anything worthwhile doi-ng is worthwhile
doing lousy. Your reputation will probably be better within the
company if you try many times and succeed sometimes than if you
fear failure and only try for sure things.
People still remember Ty Cobb, who stole 96 bases
out of 134 tries (70 percent); but they have forgotten Max Carey,
who stole 51 bases out of 53 (96 percent).
Eddie Arcaro, perhaps the greatest jockey who
ever rode a horse, had 250 straight losers before he rode his first
winner.
Make sure your name is right
Remember Leonard Slye? Few people did, until
he changed his name to Roy Rogers, an important first step in becoming
a motion picture star. How about Marion Morrison? A little feminine
for a he-man cowboy, so he changed it to John Wayne. Or Issur Danielovitch?
First changed to Isadore Demsky and then to Kirk Douglas.
“Fate tried to conceal him,” said
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, “by naming him Smith.”
Common law grants you the right to adopt any
name you want as long as you’re not trying to defraud or be
deceptive. So don’t change your name to McDonald and open
up a hamburger stand.
Also, if you’re a politician, don’t
bother to change your name to “None of the above.” Luther
D Knox, a candidate in a Louisiana gubernatorial primary, had his
name legally changed to just that However, a federal judge had Mr
None of the Above’s name taken off the ballot because the
move was deceptive.
Avoid the no-name trap Many business people fall
victim to initialitus personally as well as corporately.
As young executives, they notice that top managers
usually use initials: J S Smith, R H Jones. So they do the same
on memos and in letters.
It’s a mistake. You can afford to do that
only if everyone knows who you are. If you’re on your way
up, if you’re trying to burn your name into the minds of top
management, you need a name, not a set of initials. For exactly
the same reasons your company does.
Write your name out and look at it. Roger P Dinkelacker.
What a name like this says psychologically to
management is: We are such a big company and you have such an insignificant
job that you must use the “P” to differentiate yourself
from the other Roger Dinkelackers on the staff.
Not likely.
It is possible, if your name is something like
John Smith or Mary Jones, that you actually do need a middle initial
to differentiate yourself from the other John Smiths or Mary Joneses.
If so, what you really need is a new name. Confusion
is the enemy of successful positioning. You can’t “burn
in” a name that’s too common. How are other people going
to differentiate between John X Smith and John S Smith?
They won’t bother. They’ll just forget
you along with the rest. And the no-name trap will have claimed
another victim.
Avoid the line-extension trap
If you had three daughters, would you name them
Mary 1, Mary 2 and Mary 3? As a matter of fact, would you name them
Mary, Marian and Marilyn? Either way, you’re creating a lifetime
of confusion.
When you hang a junior on your son’s name,
you do him no favour. He deserves a separate identity. In show business,
where you must burn a clear-cut identity in the mind of the public,
even a famous last name should probably not be used. Today Liza
Minnelli is a bigger star than her mother, Judy Garland, ever was.
As Liza Garland, she would have started with a handicap. Frank Sinatra,
Jr, is an example of the most difficult kind of line-extension name.
He literally started with two strikes against him: With a name like
Frank Sinatra, Jr, the audience says to itself, “He’s
not going to be able to sing as well as his father.” Since
you hear what you expect to hear, of course he doesn’t. Nor
for that matter did Will Rogers, Jr, make much of a name for himself.
Find a horse to ride
Some ambitious, intelligent people find themselves
trapped in situations where their future looks bleak. So what do
they generally do? They try harder. They try to compensate by long
hours of hard work and effort. The secret of success is to keep
your nose to the grindstone, do your job better than the next person,
and fame and fortune will come your way, right?
Wrong. Trying harder is rarely the pathway to,
success. Trying smarter is the better way.
It’s the story of the shoemaker’s
children all over again. Too often, management people don’t
how to manage their own careers.
Their own promotional strategy is often based
on the naive assumption that ability and hard work are all that
counts. And so they dig in and work hard, waiting for the day that
someone wall tap them on the shoulder with the magic wand. But that
day seldom comes.
The truth is, the road to fame and fortune is
rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to
find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult far; the ego
to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can
do for you than on what you can do for yourself.
Kennedy was wrong. Ask not what you can do your
company. Ask what your company can do for you. Therefore, if you
want to take maximum advantage of the opportunities that your career
has to offer, you must keep your eyes open and find yourself horse
to do the job for you.
1. The first horse to ride is your company. Where
is your company going? Or more impolitely, is it-going anywhere
at all?
Too many good people have taken their good prospects
and locked them into situations that doomed to failure. But failure
at least gives you second chance. Even worse is the company with
average chances for growth.
No matter how brilliant you are, it never pays
to cast your lot with a loser. Even the best officer on the Titanic
wound up in the same lifeboat as the worst. And that’s if
he was lucky enough to stay out of the water.
You can’t do it yourself. If your company
is going nowhere, get yourself a new one. While you can’t
always pick an IBM or a Xerox, you ought to be able to considerably
better than average. Place your bets on the growth industries. Tomorrow-type
products like computers, electronics, optics, telecommunications.
And don’t forget that soft services of all types are growing
at a much faster rate than hard products. So look at banks, leasing,
insurance, medical, financial and consulting service companies.
2. The second horse to ride is your boss. Ask
yourself the same questions about your boss as you asked yourself
about your company. Is he or she going anywhere? If not, who is?
Always try to work for the smartest, brightest, most competent person
you can find.
If you look at biographies of successful people,
it’s amazing to find how many crawled up the ladder of success
right behind someone else. From their first assignment in some menial
job to their last as president or CEO of a major company.
Excerpt from ‘Positioning: The Battle
for Your Mind’ by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Reproduced with
permission © 2003, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited
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