There is a terrible rumor bouncing around in business marketing land—by getting a superior new product into the marketplace first, you gain the strategic sales advantage.

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	Gordon Hochhalter has worked in integrated marketing communications and business brand-building for more than 25 years. He's currently a managing partner at Mobium Creative Group.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The issue is not which product gets into the marketplace first, but which brand gets into your prospects' heads first. Trout & Ries were right. The real marketing battles take place in your prospects' minds before they ever take place in the marketplace. It's all in their heads.

Although it's nice to be first in the market with a new product, technology, or a new idea, the simple fact is if you don't get into your audience's heads first, you've lost the battle. After all, IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry-Rand did. It just so happened that IBM got into people's heads first with the idea. TI invented the chip that Intel made famous. Who do you think sold more of them? Who do you think made the most money on those commodity chips?

The fact of the matter is you don't have to be first in the market to be first in your prospect's mind. Being out there before everyone else is an advantage, but you can enter late and still be top of mind—if, and only if, you can catapult your brand past your competitors and into your prospects' heads first.

It's all strategy, which brings us to terrible rumor number two—which, by the way, was started by the early practitioners of positioning, who, coincidentally, couldn't create gas after a bean dinner. It says that positioning is a wholly strategic tool, that communications strategy is king, and creativity is no longer the key to success. Au contraire, mon ami.

In truth, positioning is as much a creative issue as it is a strategic one. The reason is that there's an attention famine that is sweeping the new world of business communications. It is brought on by the ever-expanding diversity of media and communications options that are fragmenting audiences and messages all over the place, increasingly spewing out features, corporate braggadocio, borrowed interest, and all sorts of irrelevant minutia like a candy conveyor belt operated by Lucy Ricardo on twelve Starbucks' triple Cafe Americanos.

In order to capture and maintain a presence in your audience's mind, you're going to have to present not only a compelling message but also a memorable, consistent personality, voice, and point of view. Each one of these components is a creative issue.

But over-arching and under-girding all of that is the basic premise of positioning, which is to get into your audience's mind first. And whether you like it or not, the key to getting there before anyone else is the sheer impact of creativity. It can speed your entry into your audience's head, right past an early entry competitor.

The cruel reality

We don't want to burst your bubble, Sparky-dot-com, but no matter what you do strategically, you're still going to have to compete with a zillion other messages. And you have only two choices on that one. You can either repeat messages over and over and over again until they finally sink in, or you can say them in such a fresh, new, surprising and relevant way that people can't forget them. Try the latter. It's a lot more effective, because when you rely on repetition you actually lose valuable time. Without creative impact, your message is relegated to the slow seep of frequency.

Frequency is osmosis, or evolution

You wait patiently for nature to take its course and for your selling points to eventually seep in, if they seep at all. This is akin to waiting for the late Jimmy Stewart to recite the Mahabharata on the back of an arthritic tortoise in a hammock hung between two trees in the intensified gravity of the planet Jupiter. It takes too damn long. In the meantime, a competitor can zip past you into your audience's head with a new idea or benefit, or even take a position or attribute or key differentiation away from you. All they need is the right strategy and the powerful engine of creative impact.

Creativity is lightning

Maybe it's time to start measuring the efficiency of your communications by their impact, instead of just reach, frequency, and CPM. And impact, my friend, is a direct result of how original, surprising, and relevant your creativity is. Despite the tremendous communications clutter out there, people will always stop, notice, and connect with a message that's fresh and direct and engaging and human. Always.

But it's not for spineless weasels. Creating communications like that means running risks. If an ad or direct marketing piece is provocative, interesting, and intriguing, it will create an adverse comment or two along the way, especially inside your company. That's when you know you've got something. In fact, if the idea doesn't make some company executive's sphincter lock up tighter than Windows '98 on overload, than you're probably not saying anything worth saying. And when his or her sweat hits the fan, that's the time the real race to market is won or lost.

Are you going to say something compelling, or dish up some more meaningless, safe technobabble?

Are you going to continue sending out interruptive, self-centered messages that tell people what they should believe about you products, or are you going to engage them in a dialogue about their needs, their interests and their business?

Are you going to act, or pass the creative around like a goatskin flask at a Blue Oyster Cult concert? Are you going to subject it to more second-guessing than schizophrenics' week on Jeopardy—until it becomes as fuzzy as Donald Trump's eyebrows, or as self-serving as an Ikea store?

Check your guts

What you really need is something as focused and memorable as Marlon Brando in a Day-Glow thong. And that kind of impact only comes from stating a relevant message in a way people have never considered before. In fact, you can test your next concept for impact:

1. Does it upset the status quo?
2. Does it question conventional thinking?
3. Does it take people by the shoulders and shake them?
4. Does it force them to reexamine their attitudes and their assumptions?

Being on the receiving end of any one of those communications can be an unsettling experience. That's what makes them impactful. That's what gives them the velocity to get you into the true marketplace first—your prospects' minds.

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