15 Very Serious Predictions for 2025

I first read the 1972 book Positioning—The Battle for the Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout sometime in the mid ‘90s. Even though it was already decades old by then, I carried this classic text with me from ad school to my first jobs in the business. And now, as Hero’s Director of Shaking a Fist at the Clouds, I gave it a re-read to see if its lessons were still relevant today. And, surprise, surprise, they are—perhaps more than ever.

First of all, what is positioning? Let’s ask Al and Jack: “Positioning is an organized system for finding a window in the mind…. 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 to give them a reason to leave.” 

Much of their approach is grounded in a challenge most brands face: positioning is easier if you’re the first-mover or category creator, but what if you’re not? According to Ries and Trout, “Then you have a positioning problem.” 

My position is that positioning has gone off the rails

A few years into my career, I found myself in a boardroom with important people who have acronyms after their names. Let’s just say their approach to positioning was very different from what I had learned from Ries and Trout. I forget who the actual client was, but let’s use Tylenol as an example.

At the time, Bayer aspirin was the go-to pain reliever, and, as we know from Reis and Trout, if you can’t be the first, you need to find a new place in the mind of consumers to position your product. Tylenol discovered this new place thanks to a simple insight: not everyone can take aspirin—people with kidney issues or high blood pressure, for example. So Tylenol was positioned as “the alternative to aspirin,” and its original positioning statement was, simply, “Tylenol is an alternative to aspirin.” 

But to return to that boardroom, the updated positioning statement my fancy colleagues presented was far more…complex: “For the savvy and discerning consumer who expects both value and performance from their pain relief products, Tylenol is the easy-to-swallow capsule proven to reduce fever and relieve minor aches and pains due to headache, backache, toothache, minor pain of arthritis, the common cold, and more.” 

We then spent an hour picking at individual words, and debating the order of the words to make sure they fit the sacred positioning statement “formula.” Back then, I figured, “Hey, I’m young, what do I know?” So I adopted what they said and how they did it. But they were wrong. 

That long, needlessly complex, and often incomprehensible positioning statement is what almost every positioning statement looks like in 2025. 

So let’s take a trip down memory lane and try to learn a few things from the past.

Lessons #1: Positioning is about them, not you

The above statement is a fundamental part of marketing strategy. But for positioning, it’s everything. If you want to position your product in the mind of your consumer, you have to actually start there—with your consumer. 

Ries and Trout use Michelob as a case study. Back in the 1970s, beer advertising was basically just creative ways to describe the product: “Real draft” or “Just a kiss of hops” or “From the land of sky blue waters” and lots of other advertising poetry. 

But Michelob was different—they started with the consumer instead of the product. The beer was premium, and premium-priced, and they wanted to be the first to fill that spot in the mind of the consumer. The result? “In beer, going first class is Michelob.”

As Ries and Trout say, “Was Michelob the first premium-priced beer? No, of course not. But Michelob was the first to build the position in the beer-drinker’s mind.” 

Within a few years, Michelob became one of the largest-selling beers in America. 

Lesson #2: It’s still not about you—it’s about your competition

Now let’s travel to Long Island in the 1970s. Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and the other “big city banks” were moving in on the territory of Long Island Trust (LIT). So LIT did some research, and learned that the new competition was just a part of their problem. 

By “mapping the prospect’s mind,” LIT learned that they ranked at the bottom of the list for general banking services. But when the questions were asked about their community, the results were flipped—Long Island Trust was good for Long Island, they said. 

Conventional strategy would say they should start running ads about how good they are for the local economy. But positioning requires you to start with what the prospect is already willing to give you. People understood why big-city banks weren’t great for Long Island, so LIT hammered that point home: 

• “Why send your money to the big city if you don’t live there?” 
• “The city is a great place to visit, but would you want to bank there?” 
• “To a city bank, the only island that matters is Manhattan.” 

In hindsight, a bank promoting the area they serve seems obvious—because it is. As Ries and Trout remind us, “The best positioning ideas are so simple and obvious that most people overlook them.”

Lesson #3: Even when it’s about you, it’s actually not

Let’s wrap this up with a fun one—Milk Duds. Switzer Clark wanted to reach a younger crowd, but for most 10-year olds, the concept of candy means an actual candy “bar,” not some weird ball of gooey chocolate.

So, they put on their kid brains and discovered something: kids love candy bars, but they don’t love how fast those candy bars are gone. And, voila, the new position for Mild Duds was born, the long-lasting alternative to a candy bar: “When a candy bar is only a memory, you’ll still be eating your Milk Duds.”

So even though the positioning seems to focus on the product, on the Milk Duds themselves, it’s really about something more nuanced: using empathy (and we’ll come back to this later) to figure out what consumers’ care about, and then shifting their perspective, reframing the category, and using emotion as the hook. 

You CAN teach new dogs old tricks

This stuff is important—positioning goes way past a campaign. It gives us a flagpole to unite around. It can guide every decision made by the client and the agency. So, instead of shaking my fist at MBA-speak and our insane desire to complicate everything, here are three steps I like to take when a new positioning project hits my desk.

Step 1: Put aside the demands, the challenges, and the drama—and just talk it out. The goal is simplicity. That’s actually not as easy as it sounds. We have to unlearn a lot to get past our desires to sound smart—especially when your boss is in the room. I’ve found that the younger members of my team love this. They get permission to be scared. They’re encouraged to be themselves. There will be no talk of design systems, ROI metrics, or the project scope (maybe a little positioning, but just a little, I promise).

Step 2: We all ask a very simple question: What is the single most-important message we want consumers to hear? You can imagine the blocks of product benefits and stats that’ll be crammed into that answer in the beginning. But, with a little time and compassion, we can usually get it down to a sentence. One that’s real. One that’s true.    

Step 3: Get into the mind of the customer. Yes, research is awesome, but not every client wants to pay for it. So, we do our best to practice empathy, to really talk about what’s going on in the customer’s head that goes above and beyond features, benefits, and RTBs. In short, we do what every creative person in every creative discipline does: we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and try to see the world through their eyes. 

Because we all need to remember one of marketing’s most enduring lessons, one that Ries and Trout’s book reaffirms: The consumer isn’t stupid. The consumer is your mother.