Positioning is a marketing exercise that combines elements of business analysis, psychology, and publicity. This does not mean “selling out”. It means understanding who you are, what you do best, and where the competition is, so that you can give yourself the best possible chance to succeed.
Texasrockfunkcountrypopfusionstuff
I once gave one of my CDs to an influential reviewer. He asked me what kind of music it was. I proudly proclaimed: “Texasrockfunkcountrypopfusionstuff,” not wanting to be pigeon-holed in this guy’s mind.
A week later I saw him. “We’re gonna review it in the blues-rock section.” WHAT?!? ‘Blues-rock?’ My CD wasn’t blues-rock. It was eclectic! It was unique! It was un-pigeon-holeable.
Two things I learned here:
1. None of us is as unique and varied as we think we are (and if we are, it’s probably a mistake).
2. If we fail to position our music and image- fail to categorize, yes, fail to pigeon-hole ourselves- then someone else will.
Tag cloud for your mind
Turns out that our minds can only hold so much information, and our notions about an artist (or anything else) fit into tidy little “pigeon holes”. This long-accepted truth in social science is called “categorization and particularization”. Two guys in 1980 even wrote a book about how apply this phenomenon to marketing (actually, they wrote several books, but they’re all the same idea, just restated).
Our minds tag things with labels: car, house, river, artist, band, good, bad, funky, bluesy, fast, slow, etc. Think of it as a Del.icio.us tag cloud for your mind. A thing, like a band or artist, may have a few different tags.
Can’t co-exist
But unlike Delicious tags, our minds don’t like tagging something with polar opposite tags. We can’t handle the cognitive dissonance. Kind of like matter and anti-matter; they can’t both exist in the same space at the same time.
We don’t think of an artist as being both “good” and “bad”, at least not in the present moment. Perhaps at one time they were good, but now they are bad, or vice-versa. At one time, they were rock, but now they’re country. They live in only one pigeon-hole in our mind, at any one time. This pigeon-hole represents their position, as Ries and Trout would call it. It’s how your mind knows where to look when retrieving memories or thoughts about that artist. Your pigeon-hole is your position!
Who cares?
You should, if you’re an artist. Basically, if someone asks you what kind of music you play, and you give them some sort of generic answer, like “Oh, our style can’t be pigeon-holed,”, then from a cognitive science point of view, you’ve told them nothing.
Your (potential) fans cannot categorize and particularize “totally original”, or “like nothing you’ve ever heard!” or “completely unique.” Their minds- literally- can’t deal with that. They’ll have to file your music somewhere in their heads, so when they hear it, it will be totally dependent on their own frame of reference, without any help from you. Plus, as Derek Sivers, founder of Cdbaby.com, points out, they may not even bother listening at all.
If you had given them a strong positioning statement, such as
- “Punk. We sound like a chainsaw cutting concrete.” Or
- “Retro-funk. We sound like a 1970s TV cop show theme.”
then you might (a) get more people to listen, and (b) suggest to them the appropriate cubby-hole in which to file away your music. At least you give yourself a chance to form the impression you want with your fans. If you give them nothing, you leave it totally up to chance.
Pick a hole
Ultimately, people who hear your music will make their own judgments about it, and find a cubby hole to put it in. But if you’ve already suggested a cubby hole, that is, a position, then they are more likely to put it into the cubby hole that you have suggested!
Easy filing
You are doing all the cognitive work of filing your music for people. The very fact that you’ve done this will be enough for people to go along with your positioning. We are all bombarded by information that forces us to work to file it away.
Imagine helping a friend clean up their office. There’s a huge stack of paper on the desk to file away. You’re not really sure where everything goes, or why. It will all go much faster if your friend just hands you the paper and says “File this under ‘Bank statements’. File this under ‘Medical expenses’.” Your friend has already categorized and particularized each of the papers for you. All you have to do is file it away as instructed.
This same technique is the essence of positioning. But there are some tricks:
- The position must not create cognitive dissonance in the mind of your fan.
- The position must be one you can support and defend.
- The position must reflect your true artistic essence.
We’ll discuss how to do these things in future articles.
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