Jack Trout passed away last week. And if you don’t know the name, you almost certainly know his concept: positioning.

Trout coined the term “positioning” and first used it in a 1969 article.  He then co-authored Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind with Al Ries, a classic ranked the top media and marketing book of all time by (an unscientific poll of) Ad Age readers.

Trout’s central insight is one we can still draw from today: the success of a product is not based its attributes as conceived of by its creators; it’s the perception that consumers have of it.

If you could travel back to 2007, along with placing profitable stock or sports bets and stopping the Hollywood writers’ strike, you’d see the success in branding of the Toyota Prius.  When hybrids entered the car market, most tried to look as much like any other car as possible, hiding that they were hybrids in fear that car buyers think them less powerful.

Toyota went the other direction, making the Prius look different, wearing the hybrid, eco-friendly label with pride.  Consumers responded, with 57% of Prius owners saying they bought the car because it “makes a statement about me.”  (The NY Times article account on this is called “Say ‘Hybrid’ and Many People Will Hear ‘Prius‘”, which says what you need to know.)

This wouldn’t have been possible pre-Jack-Trout.  Cars were sold on attributes, not the positions they held in people’s minds.

So how can a look into positioning help your nonprofit?  Well, it’s instructive to look at the types of positioning Trout and Reis articulated:

Functional positioning: when you are solving problems and providing concrete benefits.  Think here of the relationship that a health charity has to those who suffer from the disease the charity aims to remediate or eliminate.  The charity provides counseling, special diets and exercises, access to the latest research, and more.  I, for example, leaned heavily on Autism Speaks when my daughter was diagnosed. Their positioning, for me, is one of both trusted authority and debt that I owe.

The Norwegian Cancer Society recently redesigned their website and increased their donations by 250%.  And, shockingly, it involved making the donate button harder to find.  Rather, they focused on their functional positioning and asked for donations after they had solved the problems of people coming to their site.

Symbolic positioning: the Prius is an example — what does my support of your organization say about me and make me feel? There’s even a neural reason for this: our brains like when problems are solved; we like it even better when we are the ones who solve the problems (a gross oversimplification of a great study, but it’s a rich topic into which we’ll delve another time).

In working with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation, their previous controls focused on functional positioning: your gifts helps get gold medals.  However, our commitment study and pre-test of their donors found that wasn’t what donors were responding too.  Rather, they wanted the feeling of belonging that comes from being part of the team.  When the message changed accordingly, giving — both response rate and average gift — increased significantly.

Experiential positioning: what experiences do you have that are unique to your organization?  We’ve seen with every organization who uses our feedback platform the way that both good and bad experiences can shape a donor journey.  Even the most committed donor can be turned off by a highly negative experience with an organization.  Likewise, providing a unique experience can cause someone who may have made the first gift on a lark to make the second with commitment.

A good example here is Catholic Relief Services, who has mailed out three feedback mailings to their donors of the past two years.  Each mailing talks about the value of that individual, announces changes they have made to the donor experience, and asks for advice and feedback from donors.  They do not ask for money at all; not even a soft ask.

Yet each of these mailings has netted positive revenue.  The feedback has helped them shape the donor experience.  And they are netting more money on fewer mailings because they are creating a consistent positive experience for which they hope to be known.

One thing you’ll note in all of these examples is that they each require a knowledge of why people give (or why they would give) at a deeper level than “because we ask.”  Trout and Ries did not promise that it would be easy, just that it would be better.

So thank you, Jack Trout, for your contributions to our marketing expertise.  And let’s put his insights to work for our organizations and for the general good.