Jack Trout and Al Ries brought the concept of positioning into the marketing mainstream with their book, Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind, published in 1980 and since updated several times.
In brief, they define positioning as the mental short list that a consumer has in her mind when she starts to think about shopping for something.
That mental shortlist will typically be about 5 to 7 items long and often shorter, almost never longer. For example, when consumers start thinking about buying a new car, they don’t think of the dozens of possibilities out there, they think about choices with which they are already familiar and which stand out from the crowd.
“Positioning” then becomes a process of figuring out a short summary about the brand to make it memorable and likable.
For this paper what you need to discuss Disney’s positioning and the tactics/actions it uses to get this positioning to “stick” in someone’s mind.
