Quotes from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“Marriage, as a human institution, depends on the concept of first being better than best. And so does business.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“Mind-changing is the road to advertising disaster.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“companies are focused on building products rather than brands. A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products. And you build brands by using positioning strategies, starting with a good name. Any”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“Don't play semantic games with the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It's a seduction.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“the professionals who are opposed to advertising say it downgrades their profession. And it does. To advertise effectively today, you have to get off your pedestal and put your ear to the ground. You have to get on the same wavelength as the prospect. In advertising, dignity as well as pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“The Avis campaign will go down in marketing history as a classic example of establishing the “against” position.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“Don’t try to trick the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It’s a seduction. The”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“If you were forced to drink a beaker of di-hydrogen oxide, your response would probably be negative. If you asked for a glass of water, you might enjoy it. That's right. There's no difference on the palate. The difference, in the brain.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“What’s called luck is usually an outgrowth of successful communication.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position. Nyquil,”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“In politics,” said John Lindsay, “the perception is the reality.” So, too, in advertising, in business, and in life.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“In our overcommunicated society, the paradox is that nothing is more important than communication.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“You build brand loyalty in a supermarket the same way you build mate loyalty in a marriage. You get there first and then be careful not give them a reason to switch.”
― Al Ries, quote from Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

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“They’re eating liked starved apes,” Baz muttered as he swished past me with more food. “Haven’t they had enough yet?” he wondered a minute later when we passed again. “Keep your hands well clear of their forks,” he warned me as we pirouetted round each other at the dumbwaiter. “I was nearly stabbed clean through. They’ll be eating the cutlery soon!” “And us if we’re not quick enough,” I added. Baz guffawed then coughed to cover it up.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from Airborn

“Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects.
...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.
The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.”
― Stephen Fry, quote from Moab Is My Washpot

“Just an hour ago she'd slapped him, now she was upset by the thought of him with other women. She was losing her mind, she had finally flipped her lid, and she was surprised to realize that she didn't really care. Not anymore.”
― Erica Stevens, quote from Captured

“No matter what has happened, you're not a pig-boy; you're an Assistant Pig Keeper!”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Black Cauldron

“If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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