The essence of marketing is narrowing the focus. You become stronger when you reduce the scope of your operations. You can’t stand for something if y… - Al Ries

Test marketing has some benefits, but we believe the negatives far outweigh the benefits. Some of the negatives include: WASTED TIME. You can't afford to waste the time that test marketing takes, especially since the essence of branding is getting into the mind first. TIPPING OFF THE COMPETITION. Test marketing will alert competitors and perhaps stimulate one or more of them to introduce similar products. UNPROJECTABLE RESULTS. Test marketing for Enamelon toothpaste projected $50 million in annual sales nationally. Actual sales: $10 million. One of the problems with test marketing is overstimulation of demand. To get enough tangible results to measure, you usually have to run a local marketing program that you can't afford to run nationwide.

According to a recent Spencer Stuart survey, a company’s chief marketing officer has the shortest tenure of any top executive. “This job is radioactive,

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.