Content area
Full text
Keywords
Brands, Positioning
Abstract
This paper illustrates how memetics, the Darwinian science of culture and creativity, can be used to enhance brand positioning. Using a simple but powerful technique of memetic analysis, it is shown how marketers can unpack how brands are actually positioned in the minds of consumers in terms of their component memes, that is, their "genes of meaning". A demonstration of the validity and reliability of memetic analysis is given through an investigation of how the notion of "healthy living" is positioned in the minds of consumers. The practical utility of memetic analysis in brand positioning is discussed, and the possibility is raised of using the analytical tool to increase profitability by "memetically modifying" brands with true, unique and compelling consumer values.
Introduction: positioning and how it works
In today's over-communicated and product saturated consumer world, effective positioning can be critical to brand success. "Positioning" may be simply defined in terms of how a brand is positioned in the mind of the consumer with respect to the values with which it is differentially associated or which it "owns" (Ries and Trout, 1982; Marsden, 2000a). For example, the association of "safety" with Volvo may describe a de facto positioning in the mind of many consumers that has the capacity to render Volvo more or less attractive. In this way, the commercial utility of positioning lies in how the imbuing of trademarks with unique, true and compelling values can influence purchasing decisions and impact upon sales. Indeed, the entire enterprise of branding itself can be understood as an exercise in positioning; using product experience and marketing initiatives to increase profitability by associating trademarks with compelling consumer values.
Although the craft of positioning is a defining function of modern branding, the idea of positioning dates back to Classical Greece, with Plato's assertion that memories evoke related memories, thus colouring interpretation (cf. Warren, 1916). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British empiricists elaborated the Aristotelian notion that ideas are stored in memory by association, developing the three "Laws of Association"; similarity, contrast and contiguity. In this view, the positioning of a concept in the associative structure of memory defines the meaning of that concept, allowing complex concepts to be constructed out...