Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGreat for business albeit a bit light on substance
Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2021
I work in communications and a lot of the lessons outlined in “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” will carry over well in my work life. The strategies to separate your message from the myriad of other messages consumers are inundated with are discussed well enough here - and you will definitely take away a lot of lessons learned from this book if that’s what you’re looking for. Though I have to take two stars off because of the following reasons. First, it’s very outdated. For instance, it goes into detail about how television is still the most dominant place for advertising. I get that it was published in 1980, but I was left with questions about today’s actual market and what impact the internet is having on advertising and communications. I know this isn’t the fault of the authors per se, but just keep that in mind if you’re looking for ideas about modern day marketing. Second, the ideas set forth in the book are not really detailed enough and don’t have any scientific evidence or in-depth analysis. For instance, an idea will be like, “Doing A is better than B, because company C did this and company D did that, ergo, it’s better.” A lot of the information backing up their claims are based only on results of American businesses and honestly a lot of it was just glazed over because the section on the topic will end or the chapter itself will end. Finally, the writing to me sounds like a quick-talking 1920s movie. Ideas go from one to the other at a breakneck speed, and a lot of the time ideas are underlined by some sort of cliche or play on words. All in all, it’s still a good book that I learned a lot from when it comes to how I approach communications in my career. However, I will be turning to other authors who can offer more scientific evidence of positioning in a consumer’s mind as I think there’s still loads more to discuss in this realm and I didn’t get all that I wanted from this read.
