Like virtually everything written by Trout and Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind is a foundational text; it expands on concepts the authors published in 1972 after a decade of work.

As legendary adman David Oglivy wrote in his 1971 New York Times article, outlining 38 things he had learned about creating advertising:

1. The most important decision. We have learned that the effect of your advertising on your sales depends more on this decision than on any other: How should you position your product?

Positioning has since become one of the most important concepts in marketing. Every strong company today has also created a strong market position.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind is the the most through and most accessible discussion of what positioning is, how it works, and how to use it in your business.The book is oriented toward advertising, but the concept of positioning extends far beyond advertising, even to the core operations of a business.

As we describe in our brief guide to positioning, a company’s market position is the idea that the company wants to associate with itself in the minds of customers. A company’s tagline often indicates its position: Fedex guarantees overnight delivery, Verizon assures us that its network is continually improving, and Miller Lite promises great taste in a light beer.

More than simply a guide to the concept, Positioning provides examples of a broad range of marketing challenges, including the positioning of companies, products, services, the country of Belgium, and even the Catholic Church. While it doesn’t provide detailed instructions for positioning and the writing style is terse (but pithy), the many examples all have an unexpected complication with a creative solution. And, since the book also serves to sell Trout and Ries’ marketing services, each example is notably successful for the client.

Although it does not demonstrate the rigor of other marketing books and the examples are most appropriate for the large clients that Trout and Ries serves, Positioning is an essential introduction to one of the most important concepts in marketing, and it should be required reading for owners of businesses of any size.

If you aren’t familiar with the Retailing Together archives, here are a few recent book reviews that you may have missed:

• Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age. A comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of marketing and promotion with specific application to using the Internet. 
• The Profitable Retailer . A collection of powerful tips, all drawn from Doug Fleener’s extensive experience, for improving the profitability of a retail business. 
• Winning at Retail: Developing a Sustained Model for Retail Success. This sophisticated analysis of the most successful major retailers reduces the complexities of market positioning and differentiation into a simple, 5-choice model.

 All of these books tackle aspects of marketing that are critical for retailers to understand and employ. Winning at Retail considers positioning and differentiation, refining the general marketing theory to a specific theory for retailers. Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age combines theory, strategy and tactics in a structure that is the best organized and most sensible of any business book Retailing Together has ever reviewed, and The Profitable Retailer  focuses on marketing tactics that retailers can use immediately, but with a solid ( although implicit ) basis in marketing theory.

While The Profitable Retailer has the same format " a collection of tips " as other books aimed at small retailers, the content is much deeper and much more sophisticated. Many books in this genre simply recount the author’s experiences in a jumbled pile of ideas and recollections, but The Profitable Retailer uses bite-sized anecdotes and short essays to communicate several big ideas, such as the short discourse on market position in Chapter 2: 

But you’d better be the best at something or profits will be difficult to obtain. . . . Profitable Retailers, however, learn to find unique products and niches that Wal-Mart, Target, and other discounters don’t have.

This is a nugget version of the big ideas from Winning at Retail and Positioning, emphasizing that retailers need to be acceptable at a range of things, but notably the best at something, and that establishing that niche as a market position is absolutely essential. Few business books find the right balance between big ideas and easy-reading, being too academic for a broad audience, too shallow to offer any valuable information, or too bereft of ideas to be longer than a pamphlet. The Profitable Retailer does find that balance, and the the frequency with which Mr. Fleener slips important concepts into an anecdote or plainspoken bit of advice gives the reader a comforting sense that there is little mystery to running a profitable business. 

The chapters of The Profitable Retailer each cover a single topic. Each chapter is a short, easy-to-read, self-contained essay on an important business principle, and the chapters are organized into sections that cover major aspects of a business: Strategy, Customer Experience, Employee Relations, Marketing, and Operations. Although the sections are roughly the same size, it is Customer Experience that gets the lion’s share of Fleener’s attention. 

The author’s emphasis on the Customer Experience has a precedent outside the book, however. Fleener named his consultancy Dynamic Experiences Group LLC, and one of his most downloaded white papers is 50 Ways to Improve The Customer’s Experience. The same focus is evident in the The Profitable Retailer, where Fleener reminds retailers that “Profitable Retailers know they are in business for one reason: the customer. . . . Profitable Retailers are customer-centric. ”

It seems like an obvious point, since the notion that “the customer is always right” has been a mantra in retailing since the days of Marshall Field over 100 years ago. But too often retailers are focused on something else, like stocking shelves. The Profitable Retailer stresses the importance of the customer and steps beyond ”the customer is always right” to address the customer experience, the whole relationship that a customer has with a retail business. Fleener never forgets the importance of being profitable, however, and there is a limit to how right a customer may be: Chapter 21 tells the reader how to fire an unprofitable customer. 

For the staff at Retailing Together, it is the marketing chapters that give us hope for the world, because the author directly addresses some of the elements of formal marketing that retailers are not exposed to often enough, including market position, creative briefs, customer lifetime value, and the fact that advertising is a very small part of marketing.  New retailers who get a basic education in these principles are much better-prepared to run a business, and Fleener is able to make the concepts accessible and digestible. 

Reading The Profitable Retailer won’t solve all of a retailer’s business problems. The book covers a lot of topics in its 220 pages"far too many ideas in too few pages to cover any of them in depth. But depth it not its purpose, and few retailers would read a book on this subject written as an academic textbook. Instead, The Profitable Retailer is a thorough introduction to the wide range of skills a retailer needs, with enough practical advice that retailers can implement immediately to give them a strong start on the road to profitability.

Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age is the sort of business book we at Retailing Together are thrilled to find because, like The Profitable Retailer, this book teaches core marketing principles in a format that any retailer can understand and use immediately. Bob and Susan Negen don’t name those principles, probably to ward off the stench of academic textbooks, but RT is less prudent: this is a book about the Acquire-Convert-Retain model of customer relationships, with specific tips on how to use the model online and in-store. While Retailing Together can give our readers an overview of the Acquire-Convert-Retain model, the Negens offer the best collection of specific tactics for retailers. 

Acquire-Convert-Retain is the process of turning people into lifelong customers, and, as its name implies, there are three steps:

• Acquire: Get people to come into your store.
• Convert: Get people in your store to buy something.
• Retain: Encourage past customers to be continuing customers.

It seems dull when described that way, but the Negens have packaged this critical concept into a readable book with a twist for the modern Internet age: all of the business tips come in traditional “Low-Tech” tactic form and Internet age “High-Tech” tactic form. The combination of market best practices, traditional tactics, and sound advice for Internet marketing make Marketing Your Retail Store an important guide to modern retailing. 

Throughout the book, there are so many little bits that we love:

• A chapter on why advertising doesn’t usually work for independent retailers.
• Advice on writing marketing copy.
• The “Key Concept” sections.

As social marketing and new media junkies, the staff of RT gets a bit choked up when consultants from an ancient industry like retailing so thoroughly demonstrate their comfort with the changes that interactive media and other aspects of moden life have made to marketing, such as the notion that consumers want more personal, two-way relationships with businesses:

One of your challenges is to find genuine, authentic reasons to communicate with your customers. . . . This is why you must become a broader resource for your customers. . . . Become a trusted expert.

Becoming a trusted expert is the most important reason for a retailer to start a blog or add tips to a website: people buy from people they like and trust, and the Internet makes it very easy for retailers to demonstrate their knowledge of a set of products and deliver that information for free to potential customers. 

While the book is based on solid principles, there are some minor weaknesses. The high-tech tips are dead-on in spirit, but readers should not assume Marketing Your Retail Store is actually about online marketing. The book really excels at a more fundamental level, so while the high-tech tactics are generally all true, they aren’t the tactics that a dedicated Internet marketing expert would have chosen as the most important. 

For instance, the section on “14 Points to Consider When You’re Building Your Website” is true"all 14 points are good advice"but the points aren’t really the best places to start. Having your contact information on every page and using common words are fairly minor points and would not make the list of most Web marketers. The same deficit is true in other sections, resulting in little information about blogging or search engine optimization. 

The book has one other interesting omission. While it covers how to promote a store to attract potential customers, and it covers how to get existing customers to purchase more items and purchase more frequently, it does not address the task between those poles: how to get a potential customer to make the first purchase. Of course, making that first sale is a matter of salesmanship, which arguably is not an appropriate subject for a book on marketing. Since sales is a topic covered in great detail elsewhere, the omission may be interesting but also entirely sensible. 

These deficits are very minor relative to the quality of the book and don’t detract from its value to retailers, who simply need to look to other information that is dedicated to Web marketing to get a complete picture. Marketing Your Retail Store is, however, an excellent place to start, covering a broad collection of the best tactics in Internet marketing. We certainly can’t fault the Negens for being retailers first and Internet marketing advisors second. 

As a final bit of praise, we should admit that while writing the Retailing Together Marketing Primer and Guide to Building Customer Relationships, we spent a lot of time with Marketing Your Retail Store, particularly with the table of contents, trying to understand how the Negens packaged some sophisticated marketing concepts into a very readable book. Because of that, you’ll find that Marketing Your Retail Store and the Retailing Together guides fit together very nicely as an overview of core marketing concepts and a set of detailed advice on how to use those concepts to develop a profitable retail business.

Winning at Retail is a guide for retailers who want to establish a significant and notable difference from their competitors, both in the way they present themselves in marketing communications and in how they conduct their internal operations. The authors have developed a theory about what makes the most successful retailers different. They call it the Est theory of retail success. 

The Est theory states that a winning retailer must be good enough in five market positions and the best at one of them. The five positions are:

• Cheap-Est"lowest prices
• Hot-Est"most fashionable
• Big-Est"largest selection
• Quick-Est"fastest service
• Easy-Est"most convenient service

The Est theory is a prescription for a retailer’s market position, reducing all of the ways a retailer could claim to be superior to competitors to only five ways. However, it is more demanding than just a market position statement; an Est retailer must incorporate the theory into the core of its operations. The retailer can’t simply declare superiority in one of the five positions in its promotional materials"it must consistently deliver on the position and truly be superior in that position.

The book is aimed at larger retailers who have dedicated staff for the company’s various operations, and all of the examples involve large retailers like Home Depot or Target, but the ideas should apply to most retail businesses because, while small retailers may have different products or sell in different locations, they are competing against large retailers on the same five positions.

Like most popular business books, Winning At Retail is written in a direct style that is easy to read and includes many specific examples from real companies. The authors have a substantial background in formal market research, which is indicated in the strength of the ideas and not in obtuse text:  the text’s only indication of their background in research is the occasional use of the word “theory.” Otherwise, the book is very accessible.