I am NOT Maverick Marketing Sydney

THE Nine Network will overhaul its on-screen graphics and corporate rebranding within the next two months to reposition the network as “the home of TV”, according to this morning’s Australian.

Well, it won’t make a bit of difference to its ratings.

Bad luck, boys, but tinkering with the logo and adding a generic slogan is not going to raise Channel 9 from the doldrums as a serious challenger to take on Channel 7.

Who knows how much this latest slogan cost them, but I can tell you now it’s a complete waste of money.

Channel 9 lost the plot when it hired Eddie McGuire as its CEO.
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The marketplace is crowded, and its full of brands jostling for position.

They all want to win their place in the consumers mind. Wanna know how it’s done?

Then read on.

Depending on who you talk to, positioning is a marketing term that has come to mean different things to different people.

It was originally coined from The Positioning Era Cometh written in the 1970s by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

I define positioning as how the customer perceives your brand versus comparable or competitive brands.
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It was a classic Pincer Move, otherwise known as an encirclement strategy, that Qantas used to render its rival Virgin Blue’s market positioning as useless.

From its beginnings as the mums-and-dads airline, Virgin has been left the no-one-in-particular airline. And this is how it all happened.

How New Entrants Tackle Australia.

Australia is a difficult market to service. It is geographically-widespread with its largest concentration of its population on the eastern seaboard, and with a major city in the south (Adelaide) and over in the west (Perth).

For national carriers (such as Qantas, Australia Post or telecommunications giant Telstra) it is expensive to service regional centres – but service them they must do. (In Telstra’s case it is a regulatory obligation for it to be the carrier of last resort.) Typically, these carriers use the highly populous areas to subsidize the cost of servicing the regions.

When it came to airlines, the market was attractive for another entrant. Ansett had met its demise, shut up shop, leaving Qantas in virtually a monopoly position.

For Virgin Blue, the strategy was straightforward. Choose profitable routes (predominantly Eastern seaboard and popular destinations) that Qantas was using to subsidize the cost of flying to non-profitable centres, offer flights at discounted fares, and take market share.

If the market share really started to bite, Qantas would be forced to slash its prices to compete even though it was still burdened with the cost of servicing its less profitable routes. (It isn’t a unique strategy. The telecommunications industry is peppered with entrants that attempt the same thing.)

For awhile Virgin Blue was very successful. The consumer was rewarded by competition and benefited from the pricing pressure applied to Qantas. Then Virgin made a strategic blunder.
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