Positioning
"It shook up the world of marketing with all the force of a 20-megaton bomb, and now, two decades later, Positioning is still as fresh and, perhaps, even more relevant, for advertisers in the New Economy. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the classic book that changed an industry, McGraw-Hill has reunited mavens of marketing Al Ries and Jack Trout to make available to another generation of advertisers the book that forever changed the way advertising is done." "The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a "position" in a prospective customer's mind that reflects a company's own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. Writing in their trademark witty, fast-paced style, Ries and Trout explain how to position an industry leader so that it gets into people's minds and stays there, how to position a follower so that it can occupy a space not claimed by the leader, and how to avoid letting a second product ride on the coattails of an established one."--Jacket.
Stats for nerds
20recommend
41mentions
22people
2009–2025years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Three years ago I started consulting as an interim CTO for a company doing sales and marketing on behalf of other B2B SaaS. I had to onboard myself into this domain and it was quite hard as there are many snake oil sales men selling snake oil.
The first book I would read is Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. After this, in no particular order you could have a look at:
- This is Marketing by Seth Godin
- Positioning by Al Ries
- The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
- Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
- Traversing The TRaction Gap by Bruce Cleveland
- From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
I would also have a look at the models created by Winning By Design [1]. But be sceptical! These models do however hold some value in terms of visually presenting the sales funnel and gaining understanding of land and expand.
Best of luck to you!
- Advice to Founders and CEOs
- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)
Finance
- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)
Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)
- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)
Legal
- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)
Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)
- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore) - Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove) - Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh) - The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) - Good to Great (Jim Collins) - Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin) - Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman) - Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)
Pricing
- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan) - Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)
Startup Phase
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
Management/Leadership
- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) - Managing Humans (Michael Lopp) - The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp) - High Output Management (Andy Grove) - Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker) - Essentials: Management (First Round Capital) - The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo) - The Powell Principles (Oren Harari) - Radical Candor (Kim Scott) - Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda) - Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation) - Principles (Ray Dalio)
COO/Succession Planning
- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)
People Performance/HR/Culture
- Powerful (Patty McCord) - No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer) - Netflix culture deck - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) - Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock) - It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried) - The Culture Map (Erin Meyer) - The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle) - Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)
Purpose, Passion, and Self
- Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)
Fundraising/VC
- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson) - Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks) - The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani) - Done Deals (Udayan Gupta) - The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby) - VC (Tom Nicholas)
Board
- Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas) - Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)
M&A
- Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter - Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter
Marketing
- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery) - Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout) - Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins) - Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) - Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler) - Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy) - Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)
Psychology
- Influence (Robert Cialdini)
Negotiation
First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order
- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke) - Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury) - Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) - The Bald Truth (David Falk)
Self
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)
Design and UX
- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)
AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)
- Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....
Growth (Data Science, etc.)
- Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)
Graph Theory
Product
- Inspired (Marty Cagan) - Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)
Customer Loyalty/Customer Success
- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)
Finding a Startup Job
- Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)
CIO as ICP
- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller) - Be the Business (Martha Heller)
Stories
- Made in America (Sam Walton) - Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) - The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank) - Hard Drive (James Wallace) - Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) - Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull) - The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) - Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner) - Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik) - Idea Man (Paul Allen) - Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)
- That would be a long list, given that I read a lot of books and would generally say that most of the books I've read were worth investing time in to some extent. But for what it's worth, here's a subset, cribbed from my previous HN comments:
Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth - Paul Hoffman
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel
Lost in Math - Sabine Hossenfelder
The First Three Minutes - Steven Weinberg
Hyperspace - Michio Kaku
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin
About Time - Paul Davies
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene
The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe - Jim Baggott
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo
Three Roads To Quantum Gravity - Lee Smolin
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos - Seth Lloyd
Higgs - The invention and discovery of the 'God Particle' - Jim Baggott
Analogy Making As Perception - Melanie Mitchell
Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1 - Ben Goertzel
Engineering General Intelligence, Part 2 - Ben Goertzel
The AGI Revolution - Ben Goertzel
Hackers & Painters by our very own Paul "pg" Graham
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy
The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner & John Markoff
Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology - Steven Levy
Ghost In The Wires - Kevin Mitnick
The Art of Deception - Kevin Mitnick
The Art of Intrusion - Kevin Mitnick
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
It's Not About The Bike - Lance Armstrong
Ultramarathon Man - Dean Karnazes
Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Robert Bly
Report From Engine Co 82 - Dennis Smith
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - Al Ries, Jack Trout and Philip Kotler
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! - Al Ries and Jack Trout
Re-Positioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding - Al Ries and Laura Ries
Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition - Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin
Marketing High Technology - William H. Davidow
Marketing Warfare - Al Ries
The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Crossing The Chasm - Geoffrey Moore
How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard
Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Founder of Vivid, maker of Vivid Trace for Atlassian Jira and Confluence. Landing page:
https://vivid-inc.net
I'd like to put this up (primarily the landing page) for constructive critique. Hopefully there is an opportunity for all of us to learn here.
While there are some people behind the scenes and many outsourcers, I have been doing all marketing by myself. Crucially, I recognize that I have a severe lack of skill in this department. I've been running this business for 8 years and have "enough" skills in value creation, customer development & support, etc. The product has traction, it solves real problems for currently paying customers. BUT after reading much Indie Hackers etc. and HN items on marketing like
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29538355
marketing feels like a gaping void to me. And that deficiency has been acting as a dis-abler to the business. So, last week, I decided to dive into the deep end of marketing.
The current landing page was completed several months ago in 2021 October. Perhaps it's a reasonable image of my current thinking and abilities. Transforming customer problems into messaging was interesting and even fun, but I still find writing to be excruciating. I believe in focusing on the desired outcomes for people, and in truthful representation of reality; so that should be on the page. The main purpose (CTA or Call To Action) is for the reader to start a 30-day free trial. The landing page content is structured to be later divided into targeted landing pages, one per profession (software dev, QA tester, lead, etc.), and also one per vertical (insurance, banking, manufacturing, and so on) where current customers are (also thinking case studies here). Each landing page will harmonize well with targeted SEO and ads.
Point of interest: This is how I have grown in terms of awareness of marketing, off the top of my head:
Early 2010s: Importance of SEO, on-page SEO (WWW), "The SEO Periodic Table", Google Webmaster / Search Console (or whatever it was called). Business Model Canvas. Customer Development (marketing materials speak in the customers' own language). Book "Nail It then Scale It" by Nathan Furr. Pirate metrics, AIDA. Customer Experience, and in particular Customer Journey and touchpoints.
Late 2010s: Features/Advantages/Benefits (FAB). Importance of positioning & declaring your niche amongst the competition, Book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" by Al Ries. Jobs To Be Done. Headline writing. Tone, phrasing.
This week: Initiated Google Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns to build up high-intent top-of-funnel leads. Book: "The 1-Page Marketing Plan" by Allan Dib (pragmatic + really good so far), "Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford.
- A couple that might be worth considering:
https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Branding/dp/0060007...
https://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Mind-Annivers...
https://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-Com...
https://www.amazon.com/What-Sticks-Advertising-Guarantee-Suc...
https://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/14...
- 'Positioning' by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Where it all started.
