How To Position Your Business For Maximum Success Masterclass with Dan Kennedy

And then the positioning in it. Who are you? What are you known for? Who are you for? What is your legend? What is understood concisely that is repeated about you person to person to person to person.

Hello and welcome to this month's Masterclass. I'm Darcy Juarez here with Dan Kennedy. And Dan, I'm excited for this month's masterclass because I hear you often start advice off really for any business with some form of we need to position ourselves in the business and that there's power we can gain from that positioning. So can you start this month off with defining positioning?

Yeah, it really started being talked about in advertising and marketing with the admin, Al Reese and Jack Trout in their book Positioning the Battle for the Mine. Al was a member of ours for many years. He's retired now. Jack wasn't, I don't think, but Al was. And they sort of made it famous in the advertising space. And their book title is Fair. It is about what you can own inside your market, your prospect's mind. Here, the phrase, it's usually used in politics about, oh, he's taken over space in the opponent's mind. Yes. Oh, he's rented space, the opponent's mind. And to the extent usually that a candidate is thinking about his opponent, he's not thinking about his market, and he starts to fail. And so for business, it is the same. It's about how much space can you get in your category in their mind. So you basically squeeze everybody else out in that category, or at bare minimum, you are always thought of first. Jay Abraham calls it preeminence. So there are winners at this and there are losers at this. And each are instructive. Okay, so you could simplify it by, if you ask your market or the public, give me a name for this. Whose name or what business name will they give you?

Okay.

And what will be given to you most often and what will be given to you first? Right. So like, if you do money, it's Warren Buffett. Okay. Was it always? But it has been for quite some time. And it is now. It won't be, because Warren is not going to live forever, but it is now. And so everybody else is trying to be the second one they think of in that category. Warren has done it brilliantly. Right. In terms of the genius of our time, or you would ask somebody for the Edison of our time, for the Alexander Graham Bell of our time, or that you're going to get Elon Musk, you would have got somebody different 15, 20 years ago. But right now, you're going to get Elon Musk. He's going to be the first one people think of. He staked out that space and he is thought of as a genius really about everything. Jimmy dimondit, bank of America who's no Trump fan, endorsed yesterday the idea Trump's plan to put Elon in charge of a version of the old Grace Commission to find waste, fraud and abuse and make government more efficient, you know and, and all that. So Elon is thought of as a genius not just in invention but in finance and business. Deserve it or not, right. If you think about religion certainly here, at least in America, you're going to get Christianity first. There's a lot of them, but you're going to get Christianity first. They kind of own that space in most people's minds including atheists for seniors, AARP when they fundamentally an insurance company has taken that space. So that's, that's successes. Those who had it once and lost it, Cadillac is a prime example. So Cadillac in the 1960s, 70s and 80s Cadillac was the top of the pyramid. If you had a Cadillac in your driveway, you announced to everybody that you had made it, you had arrived. The salesman's car of aspiration was the Cadillac. Mary Kay famously gave pink Cadillacs as awards. Well Cadillac is totally lost that they don't own that position at all. I'm not sure anybody does but they definitely do not. Holiday Inns which we're filming it Holiday Inns at one time owned the mid price Travelers Motel. Both the business traveler and the vacation traveler. You knew like Kroc used to say about, about McDonald's you knew what you were going to get. Consistency, uniformity was very good. Locations in many cases were at major interstate exits. So traffic salesman always stayed in in the year that I was one of those out of five state territory I mean literally happy hour every day the bar's full of sales guys. We used to, we used to exchange samples. So I'll give you three of these and you give me, you know one of them things. I'll take that home to my wife. Yeah, I mean that's how many sales there were there. Right so but audience has lost that completely. It dissolved out from underneath the CNN for a time owned it for news. They took it away from the networks and with Tay Turner's creation and 24 hour news they were the news. You went to CNN, that's where you went. The Iraq war helped them enormously. Thus that was the first live time televised war we've ever had. And CNN was there Everybody else's ratings went down, by the way, during that and infomercial crashed because everybody was watching cnn. But CNN owned that position, right? They're now a shadow of their former self. They've lost control of it. Fox ruined it for them more than anybody else. But now the fragmentation of non broadcast media, Internet, social media, a lot of people only get their news from Facebook. They only get their news from TikTok. CNN joke is if it weren't for airports and doctor's offices, waiting rooms, they'd only have three viewers. And so you can have this and you can fail to protect it and you can lose it, but it is what you want is the ownership of this space and then the positioning in it. Who are you? What are you known for? Who are you for? What is your legend? What is understood concisely that is repeated about you person to person to person to person.

So can you give us some of the, what are the essential elements then of power positioning?

So a couple resources. First, Robert Greene's book Power is a little heavy for some people, but it is a. It is a study in this. There's another book, same title, that's old. Oh, it's written by Michael Corda, who at one time was president of Simon Schuster. And it's really good. But it's old, you gotta hunt for it. And Ringer's Weddings are intimidation or the newer version deal with it a lot too. To be simple, there's five things, some of which we talk about a lot, some of which we don't talk about as much. So people are more familiar with some than others. But so one is authority. The word author is in there for a reason. Two is celebrity to your market. Of course, if you aren't in the media, you're nobody. And broadly, by the way, to the public, regardless of what 20 year olds may think, if you aren't in real media, you're nobody. The exceptions are so few. The Joe Rogans of the world are so few. Oprah became an almost Oprah who by giving up her television show. President Biden today was on the View. Just interesting in and of itself. I'll bet it was a real train wreck. But that's neither. Hearing air. Why go there? Because that's real media. It has a huge audience. The audience is not fragmented to 67 different places. So celebrity, credibility, believability, which credible are you credible? Can you be believed about your area of service or expertise for a distinct Persona? Like it or not, the meek may inherit theaters, but that's the only way they're going to get it because vanilla and quiet just does not work.

If you want to learn more about this video, you can get access through our membership portal. Check out our website below to get full access to all masterclass videos from Dan Kennedy. Oh, and don't forget to subscribe and check out these videos.