Positioning: the mind is not an empty vessel
What a classic 1981 advertising book teaches public affairs practitioners about where communication breaks down
Masters in Public Affairs goes back to the foundational books in this field and extracts the principles that the best practitioners return to again and again. Join the growing number of subscribers on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.
For 13 years in a row, Avis lost money. Thirteen years. Then, in 1962, it ran a campaign that said: “Avis is only number two in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.”
Which is when it began to make a lot more money.
However, some people take away the wrong lesson from this story.
They think Avis succeeded because they tried harder — that the message was about effort and hustle. Ries and Trout are clear that’s wrong. Avis succeeded because they acknowledged where they sat in the prospect’s mind and used that position to their advantage.
They didn’t claim to be better than Hertz. They didn’t pretend to be the leader. They said: we’re number two, and here’s why that’s a reason to choose us.
Here's the fascinating part: Avis didn't change the product. They didn't get better cars or friendlier staff or lower prices. They changed where they sat in the customer's head. They accepted the mental hierarchy that already existed and found a way to make their rung work for them.
And for some reason, then took that tremendous success and toss it out the window. After the company was acquired, Avis ran a new campaign: “Avis is going to be number one.” That’s advertising your aspirations — telling the market what you wish were true instead of working with what the market already believes. It didn’t work. Ries and Trout call it wrong psychologically and wrong strategically.
Why did the first campaign work and the second one fail? Same company, same product, same market. The difference was where they started.
The first campaign started with what already existed in the prospect’s mind — Hertz is number one, and everyone knows it — and built from there.
The second campaign started with what Avis wanted to be true and pushed it outward. The mind accepted the first and rejected the second.
That distinction is the entire argument of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, published by Al Ries and Jack Trout in 1981. Their conclusion:
“You look for the solution to your problem not inside the product, not even inside your own mind.
You look for the solution to your problem inside the prospect’s mind.”
The solution to your communication problem is not a better argument, a sharper brief, or a more compelling data set. The solution is understanding what already exists in the mind of the person you're trying to reach — and working backward from there.
Ries and Trout call this "positioning," and they argue it's the foundational discipline for anyone trying to communicate in an over-saturated information environment.
They wrote that in 1981, with three television networks and no internet. The environment has gotten worse. The mechanism hasn't changed.
Before you read another brief or walk into another meeting, ask yourself: What does the person across the table already believe about this issue, about my industry, and about the competitive landscape of stakeholders trying to influence this decision?
If you don’t have an answer, your brief is probably noise to them.
If you do have an answer, you’ve got a shot at a position.
Why this book matters
Most people file Positioning under marketing. It lives on CMO bookshelves, gets taught in business schools, and a lot of practitioners in our field have never picked it up because they assume it’s about selling consumer products.
But I think it belongs in the public affairs canon. So much of what we do is positioning — positioning an issue so it occupies a specific mental slot before a competitor gets there, positioning our organisation so a minister thinks of us first, positioning a specific policy ask so it’s hard to oppose.
We did a lot of that in the Prime Minister’s Office, making sure every piece of legislation had a title that would make it politically painful for the opposition to vote against. It works.
Ries and Trout’s core diagnosis is that the mind doesn’t receive information neutrally. It defends against it. It screens out what doesn’t match existing beliefs, ranks what gets through into simplified hierarchies, and anchors hard on whoever gets there first.
In 20 years of practice, the pattern I’ve seen more often than any other is teams that lead with their cognitive argument — strong data, sound logic, clear recommendations — and expect the quality of the evidence to carry the day. It almost never works the way we expect it to. The decision maker already has a picture in their head. If the brief doesn’t fit that picture, the mind doesn’t update. It filters.
Ries and Trout explain why, and they offer a disciplined alternative: start with the prospect’s mind, figure out what’s already there, and build your position around that reality instead of against it.
What We Cover in This Episode
Why a 1981 advertising book belongs in the public affairs canon
How the mind filters, ranks, and anchors information — and what that means for how we design campaigns
Why leading with facts and cognitive arguments is the most common pattern in public affairs and the least effective
Naming as a strategic weapon — lessons from the PMO on legislative titles and policy framing
The coalition dilution trap: how the instinct to build consensus often destroys the sharpness of your position
Why the public assesses your issues against their own self-identity before deciding whether to support you — a blind spot the book itself underexplores
The Avis, Tylenol, Xerox, and Taster’s Choice case studies
Connections to Lippmann’s stereotypes, McRaney’s identity-protective cognition, Luntz’s language discipline, and Centola’s threshold dynamics
Four mental models worth carrying around: the Ladder, the Créneau, the Teeter-Totter, and Sacrifice
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Bonus: five ideas from the book that didn’t make the episode
The episode covers the core architecture of positioning. But there’s more in the book worth knowing. Here are five ideas from my highlights that didn’t make the cut.
