Marketing positioning is the process of taking your product or service and presenting it as the obvious choice for your consumers. Hardly anyone seems to be doing this these days. And yet this is fundamental to making your products and services easier to sell.

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Marketers today are so focused on producing clever advertising, they often miss the forest for the trees. How many ads are so entertaining that you wind up sharing them with your friends (additional free viral advertising!) ... except you can't remember the name of the product they were selling?

How many ads are so "me too" you wonder why they bother? For example, how many ads have you seen for "absolutely, positively free checking?" Everybody's got this now. Why should you go to one bank rather than another?

Hint No. 1: There is no reason. Hint No. 2: You can create a reason. Hint No. 3: You can define powerful, intangible, perceived value for your products and services, often without spending a dime.

Perhaps the CEO is at the root of the problem, because he or she wants a quick, cheap and cheerful stopgap solution, rather than one in which you take the time and energy to address the fundamental issue.

Sometimes you do get a quick solution. The makers of Nyquil originally set out to make a cold and flu remedy that would compete with market leaders Contac and Dristan. They developed a great product with one flaw: It made people drowsy. Fortunately, they had a marketing individual with a brilliant idea: Let's position this as a nighttime cold and flu remedy! They turned the product's principal weakness into its principal strength.

Moreover, they created a new playing field, a new niche: nighttime cold and flu remedies. In this niche they had "first mover advantage," which allowed them to become the market leader and gain and retain market share dominance. As a result, they've also stolen significant share from the other big boys in the "daytime/anytime" cold and flu remedy market.

A cigarette manufacturer did something similar in the already overcrowded tobacco market. It created a new niche, cigarettes for women, and from that day to this, Virginia Slims has dominated that market. Remember Eve cigarettes? If you're under 30, probably not. First mover advantage in a new market is a very powerful thing.

Maybe you should be thinking about how you can position your products or services in their own niche, and gain market dominance. Now that's a concept!

But wait. If we pick a niche, doesn't that mean we're giving up on the rest of the market? Why would we want to do that?

Sometimes you willingly (gleefully!) give up on the rest of the market. For example, it's true that Virginia Slims completely gave up on the male smokers market. Given that they owned the female smokers market, I don't think anyone lost his job over that decision.

However, often seemingly myopic claiming of a narrow niche actually gets you more business through transference or association. For example, Pittsburgh's best-known attorney took a bold position as the accident victim attorney. (Everyone should know whom I'm talking about. Hint: There is never a fee unless he gets money for you!) Since he was the first to do it, and did it really well, he claimed first mover advantage and achieved that always-hard-to-displace market dominance.

Even if this were the entire market share he garnered, he probably would have been the most successful attorney in the region. But watch what else happened. People think: Well, if he's the "best" (intangible perception resulting from brilliant marketing) accident victim attorney, he also must be good at fill-in-the-blank (defective products problems, fraud-based class-action lawsuits, etc.).

At times, positioning is more complex than just spinning your product or service, and you need to actually alter your product or service. This is where a chief executive officer really needs to be flexible and open-minded. For example, take our local banking chains. How can we differentiate? (Hint: It's not by offering absolutely free checking.) Maybe it's by being the friendliest neighborhood bank. In this case, it's not enough to merely advertise this. You need to back it up with real employee training, and in-bank experiences that shout, "We love our customers!"

The point is that positioning properly is more than branding and advertising; it's defining a niche, clarifying differentiation, establishing a well-researched value proposition and then aligning some or all of: your company, your existing customers' perceptions, your staff, your storefront and your corporate communications consistent with the new positioning.

The alternative is to continue to look like everyone else, create ads that don't give customers any salient reasons to choose your products or services over your competitors', play second fiddle to the indomitable market leaders and keep cycling through marketing vice presidents and advertising agencies, hoping to finally find the right one.

What happened to marketing positioning? Nothing really. Some folks just forgot about it and got caught up in nifty ads. It's still here, waiting for you to take charge of your marketing. Maybe it's time to bring it out of the basement, dust it off and work some magic with your sales and marketing efforts. Your shareholders will be glad you did.