You know what, son… you can’t get there from here

In the marketing classic Positioning: The Battle For Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout tell a parable about a traveler who’s lost in rural New England.

The man stops his car, rolls down the window, and asks a local farmer for directions to a nearby town.

The farmer thinks for a while, shakes his head, and says:

“You know what, son… you can’t get there from here.”

It’s a funny way of saying that the roads from this particular town don’t directly lead to where the traveler is trying to go. Instead, he’ll have to go back quite a ways and start from a different point entirely in order to reach his destination.

The authors use this story as a metaphor for marketing strategy.

When a company tries to enter the market, or more importantly, the mind of the consumer from the wrong direction (wrong positioning, wrong message, wrong point of view), then it doesn’t matter how clever or expensive the ad campaign is… the road just isn’t going to get them there.

If people already associate a category with a certain brand (for example, Coke = Cola, Xerox = Copiers, Kleenex = Tissues), then trying to take the exact same path to position something new is like trying to reach a town using a road that doesn’t connect.

You won’t get there from here…

To get there, you often have to start from somewhere else.

A new angle, a different category, or a fresh perspective if you want to gain importance in your prospect’s mind.

And you can’t do that by simply shouting louder from where you currently stand.

You have to start from your customer’s current map of associations instead of your own.

And you have to accept that sometimes you need to go back and reframe your message entirely in order to be understood, and therefore, remembered.

Because that’s all marketing is…

Memory.

Stand out, get remembered, and become impossible to ignore.

That’s how you master your marketing.

Anyway…

One of the things I’ll cover in the version 2 update of 15 Legendary Writing Secrets is how understand and utilize positioning in your content creation efforts so that every piece of content you create draws your ideal clients, the people you seek to serve, the people you can help the most your existing skills and ideas, ever closer to you and your business, so that when it finally comes time to buy, you have already become the easy and obvious choice in your readers mind.

And if you buy the original 15 Legendary Writing Secrets now, not only can you start applying them to your content immediately, but you’ll also get version 2 as soon as it’s released in the next 2 weeks.

And on top of that, I’ll also give everyone who buys a behind-the-scenes, over-the-shoulder-look at how I’m using it to grow my business using paid and organic traffic methods in the weeks and months that lie ahead.

If that interests you, grab a copy using the link below, and I’ll reach directly in your inbox in the next few days.

https://kevinhood.me/legendary

Kevin Hood