# Evolution, Not Revolution *Call it lineage amnesia. Except nobody forgot. Most of us were never taught in the first place.* **Written by JD Prater — 3x VP of Marketing.** This piece is part of *Open Folders*, which sits at the intersection of marketing science, consulting research, and practitioner experience, written for marketers about to see the evidence their training left out. Newsletter: https://jdprater.substack.com Website: https://jdprater.com Original post: https://jdprater.substack.com/p/evolution-not-revolution A former boss handed me *Scientific Advertising* around 2010. I'd studied history and political science, not marketing, and I was trying to understand direct response copywriting well enough to be useful. The book was almost 90 years old at the time and it didn't feel like it. It was the first real education I got in this field, and it did something specific: it told me the thing I was trying to learn had already been written down, argued over, and tested, decades before I showed up. Claude Hopkins wrote *Scientific Advertising* in 1923. He tested headlines against each other. He printed a slightly different code on the coupon in every newspaper, Chicago got one, New York got another, so when a customer mailed one back, he knew exactly which ad, which paper, which line produced the response. It's the 1923 version of a tracking pixel. He turned advertising into something you could measure instead of something you guessed at. It's one of the first books anyone hands you when you're trying to understand this field, and for good reason. Most people never get told the next part. Hopkins wasn't the beginning either. "The History of Advertising could never be written without first place in it being given to John E. Kennedy, for every copywriter throughout the length and breadth of this land, is today being guided by the principles he laid down." Hopkins wrote that. About someone else. John E. Kennedy walked into Lord & Thomas in 1904, four years before Hopkins joined the same agency. He gave advertising a definition that stuck, though almost nobody quotes it right: not "salesmanship in print," the phrase everyone repeats, but "Salesmanship-on-Paper," his own words, printed over and over across his own book. He invented reason-why copy, the idea that an ad has to give the prospect an actual reason to buy, not just a mood or a repeated name. Kennedy's own book on the subject came out roughly 18 years before Hopkins'. Hopkins took reason-why copy and made it testable. He didn't invent the ground he was standing on. He said so himself, in print, unprompted. Go back further and you hit John Wanamaker. In 1874, decades before Kennedy, Wanamaker put his name on a printed promise: full guarantee, one price, cash payment, cash returned. Most retail at the time ran on haggling and no returns. That same year he ran what's recorded as the first half-page newspaper ad ever published. Five years later, the first full page. Wanamaker is also where the most famous quote in this entire field lives, and it isn't real. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." It's been pinned on Wanamaker for over a century. It's also been pinned on a British soap magnate, a tobacco executive, and a chewing gum heir. Nobody's archive has it. The most quoted line about not knowing where credit belongs turns out to have no real attribution itself. You can't write that irony. It just happened. So this is a post about 152 years, and that number is the whole argument in miniature, before the argument even starts. Every framework in modern marketing strategy, the ones taught in business school, the ones consultancies sell decks on, the ones marketers argue about on LinkedIn like they're brand new, is doing what Hopkins did to Kennedy. Taking a real, working idea and making it sharper and more usable for whatever room it lands in next. Some of the people in this post credited the room before them generously, in print, unprompted. Most of us using their work today have no idea the room existed at all. I want to walk through the actual lineage: where the good ideas in marketing strategy came from, who built on whom, and what changed each time. Underneath everything below, marketers keep circling back to four questions, in different clothes, over a century and a half apart. What job is a buyer actually hiring something to do? What's the shape of the market that buyer sits inside? How do you win a place in their mind? And is winning it even worth the trouble? Every framework in this post is an attempt to operationalize one of those four, whether it renames the question, splits it into sub-questions, or builds a whole methodology to answer it more precisely than the last room managed. Watch for which one each new name is actually circling. By the end, two of the four turn out to be closer than they look. I should say how this map got drawn, because a post about people being written out of history has to leave people out to stay readable, and I'd rather own that up front than get caught at it. This isn't the complete record of marketing thought, and you wouldn't want it to be. Every chain below traces a framework practitioners are actually running this quarter, and every date, quote, and attribution in it was checked against the earliest source I could reach, not against whoever retold it last. Whole shelves are missing on purpose: the effectiveness literature this newsletter covers every other week, behavioral economics entirely, and academic brand equity, which gets exactly one sentence. Everything that survived, I can stand behind line by line. One framework belongs in this lineage before any of the four questions, because it's the one exception to something true of almost everything else on this list. --- ## 4Ps: a checklist, not a mandate James Culliton, teaching at Harvard, made the first move in 1948, describing marketers as "mixers of ingredients" in a paper on marketing costs. He never built the elements into a fixed list. His colleague Neil Borden did, 12 separate factors, product planning, pricing, branding, distribution, personal selling, advertising, and more, what he himself called "the important elements of ingredients" of a marketing programme, and used the phrase consistently enough that his 1953 address to the American Marketing Association is usually cited as the moment the term took hold. It was thorough. It was also too many moving parts for anyone to actually hold in their head during a real decision. The marketing mix and the 4Ps aren't the same thing, even though the two get used interchangeably now. Borden's own definition, quoted above, never tightened past that. Philip Kotler's textbook did, 48 years later: "the set of marketing tools that the firm uses to pursue its marketing objectives in the target market." The 4Ps is neither Borden's phrase nor Kotler's definition. It's one specific way of sorting what's inside the mix both of them were describing, McCarthy's way, and it wasn't the only one on offer at the time. In 1957, John Howard got close to the eventual answer without anyone remembering he got there first: product, price, channel, promotion, virtually the same shape McCarthy would settle on three years later. E. Jerome McCarthy, teaching at Michigan State, published his own four-part version in 1960, Product, Price, Place, Promotion, embedded inside a full textbook covering analysis, consumer behavior, market research, segmentation, and planning, not a standalone definition the way Howard's was. The field still hadn't converged. Albert Frey split the mix into "the offering" and "the methods and tools" in 1961. Lazer and Kelly proposed a three-part goods, distribution, and communication model in 1962. Kotler didn't originate any of it. He spread McCarthy's specific classification of it, and said plainly why it deserved to spread: its value was pedagogical. None of that makes the 4Ps wrong. It makes it one answer among several plausible ones, picked because it taught well, not because the field ever agreed it was the only true shape of the mix. Four levers were never a mandate. They were the version that survived the room. The 4Ps stands apart from everything else in this post in one specific way, and it has nothing to do with who runs product, price, and place day to day. Marketing rarely does, that territory usually belongs to R&D, finance, sales, and ops. The difference is who the framework itself was built for, and how much of the job it claims. Porter's Five Forces and value chain, Bain's Profit Pools, Ansoff's matrix, Martin's cascade, all of that is general business strategy, built for CEOs and corporate strategists, that marketing borrowed or got handed accountability for without the authority to match. Much of the rest, positioning, STP, mental availability, was built specifically for marketers solving a marketer's problem, how to win a mind, how to read a market. The 4Ps never was. It's a simplified classification of the marketing mix, built to teach commercial thinking, the same view of the firm's whole toolkit Borden and Kotler were both circling, not a mandate to own all of them. Among the frameworks that survived, it's still the only classification on this list that claims the whole growth system, all four levers at once, not one discipline inside one of them. Being a 4Ps marketer means understanding how all four levers work together to drive growth, even while owning execution on exactly one of them, Promotion. It's a lot like being asked to win a Formula One race and discovering, once you're strapped into the car, that you only control the radio and the horn. The engineers control the steering and the gas. If you lose, it's still your fault. Marketing adopted the classification. The authority mostly wasn't included. Mark Ritson put McCarthy's original intent in one sentence in 2026: "The four Ps were originally created to remind marketers, these are your four levers. It was a checklist. Don't forget." His answer for why it kept expanding anyway lands on the same failure this post already argues: marketers invented more Ps, personality, purpose, people, while quietly losing track of the three original ones nobody had ever actually been assigned to own. One question follows naturally: what happened to the 4Ps after McCarthy. Not much, and not in the way everything else in this post got extended. Robert Lauterborn tried in 1990, flipping the four letters into four Cs, Consumer, Cost, Convenience, Communication, in an *Advertising Age* piece literally titled "Four Ps Passé." Same four buckets, mirrored from the seller's side to the buyer's, no new mechanism inside them. Academics did something different. Christian Grönroos and the Nordic School called the whole paradigm's foundation weak and proposed relationship marketing instead. Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch went further in 2004, arguing marketing had inherited a "goods-dominant logic" from economics and needed a different one entirely, service-dominant logic, built around what a product does for a buyer rather than what a company manufactures. A 2006 literature review by Efthymios Constantinides checked the mix against five separate subfields and found the same two complaints everywhere: too internally oriented, too little room for the buyer to talk back. The 4Ps never got a Jobs-to-be-Done-style relay, no 70-year chain of people sharpening the same working idea. What it got instead was a fork: practitioners kept bolting on more letters, academics gave up repairing it and argued to replace it outright. That difference is explainable, not just a historical accident. Jobs to be Done, mental availability, positioning all started as a claim you could test, a describable pattern in real buyer behavior that later thinkers could refine, extend, or falsify. The 4Ps was never that. McCarthy built it as a teaching taxonomy, four buckets small enough to fit in an MBA lecture, not a falsifiable mechanism. Taxonomies don't get refined the way theories do. They get expanded, or they get discarded for a different taxonomy. That's exactly what happened here. The 4Ps isn't purely untestable, and the bigger conclusion needs that complication first. When it met a context it didn't fit, services, where the product is inseparable from the person delivering it, it broke in a way people could point to, which is exactly why Booms and Bitner added People, Process, and Physical Evidence in 1981. The taxonomy does have edges. The shape of the fix is the tell. Nobody refined Product, Price, Place, or Promotion. They added three more boxes and left the original four exactly as McCarthy wrote them. A theory that fails gets corrected. A taxonomy that fails gets extended. Coordination explains part of why it survives 65 years later, arguments and all. Marketing, sales, finance, and ops can all use "the 4Ps" as shared shorthand, and replacing a shared vocabulary means an entire room switching at once, not just a handful of academics agreeing among themselves. Its own vagueness explains another part, paired with having nothing underneath it to test. A specific claim, like Ehrenberg's purchase patterns, only generalizes as far as the data supports it. A four-word checklist generalizes to almost anything, because it never claimed a mechanism in the first place, which means there was never a result that could prove it wrong. It's also possible Vargo and Lusch were never fighting the same fight in the first place. Service-Dominant Logic is a philosophy of exchange. The 4Ps was built as an operational checklist for a marketing plan. Both can be true answers to different-altitude questions, which explains the stalemate better than either side simply losing the argument. None of that fully explains the 65 years on its own. The bigger pattern: frameworks that are cheap to teach and cheap to defend in a meeting tend to outlast frameworks that are merely more accurate. It's the same selection pressure this newsletter keeps finding in every other room it looks into, showing up one level up this time, in a classroom instead of a budget meeting. --- ## Jobs to be done: 73 years of the same question A product marketer stood up in a roadmap meeting once and said the team needed to run some JTBD interviews before the next release. Everyone nodded. Nobody asked what JTBD actually meant, where it came from, or why an interview about a job would tell you anything a feature request didn't already say. It got scheduled anyway, wedged between a pricing review and a competitor teardown. People buy drills to get holes. Nobody hangs a drill on the wall. That line, or something close to it, is usually credited to Theodore Levitt. Levitt didn't say it first. An advertising executive named Leo McGivena is the earliest name attached to it, documented in Percy Whiting's 1947 sales book, and even that attribution has some earlier, thinner trail behind it. Levitt himself named McGivena, which almost nobody retelling this story seems to know. His own 1969 book quotes him directly, "Last year 1 million quarter-inch drills were sold, Leo McGivena once said, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes." The credit only disappears later, in a 2005 *Harvard Business Review* article crediting "the great Harvard marketing professor" without naming McGivena at all. That 2005 piece was written by Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, the same Christensen this post is about to spend the next several paragraphs on. The most famous line about what customers actually want got its credit erased by the exact person whose own theory this post traces next, not by the person everyone blames for it. Peter Drucker put the actual words "jobs to be done" into print, in *Innovation and Entrepreneurship*, 1985. Not a metaphor about drills, the literal phrase, though he used it for something narrower than what it later came to mean: diagnosing the weak link inside a process a company already runs. The phrase existed before the theory did. Five years later, Tony Ulwick started building a methodology around the same question, in his own vocabulary at first, customers seeking "outcomes" rather than jobs. Ulwick came from Six Sigma, the manufacturing discipline built to hunt down defects on an assembly line until a car door fits its frame 99.999 percent of the time. In 1990, he pointed that same lens at a different kind of failure: a new product nobody bought. Treat the flop like a defect, he reasoned, and you can trace it back to a cause the same way you'd trace a bad weld. He named the resulting process Outcome-Driven Innovation in 1999, "what job is this hired to do" turned into something you could actually run on repeat. That same year, by his own account, he introduced the whole approach directly to a Harvard Business School professor named Christensen, the start of what Ulwick describes as a collaboration that ran for years afterward. Christensen is the name most people actually know, and he was already famous by the time Ulwick reached him. *The Innovator's Dilemma*, 1997, had already made him the most cited name in innovation theory, two years before that introduction. Nearly everyone gets this wrong: *The Innovator's Dilemma* isn't the Jobs to be Done book. It never mentions the phrase. The actual theory first appears four years later, in the 2003 follow-up, *The Innovator's Solution*, which named Ulwick directly, a specific chapter, a specific example, not a vague nod to the field. By his own telling, the puzzle that started the theory came from two consultants, Bob Moesta and his partner Rick Pedi, who'd been running real case studies with Christensen at Harvard Business School since the mid-1990s. Christensen also wrote, in that same 2003 book, that it was Pedi who "coined for us the language Jobs to be Done." The professor everyone credits with the theory credited a food-industry consultant most marketers have never heard of with its name. The version everyone actually remembers is a milkshake. A fast food chain wanted to sell more of them. They did the obvious thing first, pulled a demographic profile of the typical milkshake buyer, ran some focus groups, and asked what people wanted, chunkier, sweeter, cheaper. They built it. Sales didn't move. Moesta's team dropped the demographics and just watched the counter for 18 hours a day instead, and found something the focus groups never surfaced: a disproportionate share of milkshakes sold before 8:30 in the morning, almost always to someone alone, in work clothes, who took it straight to the car. Nobody eats a dessert alone at 8am on a Tuesday. So the next morning they asked those buyers directly: what job are you hiring this milkshake to do? The answer had nothing to do with dessert. It was a long, boring commute, one hand tied up on the wheel, and something heavy enough to hold off hunger until noon. Against that job, a donut disappears in four bites and leaves your hands sticky, a banana is gone before the on-ramp, and a bagel showers crumbs on your shirt. A milkshake takes 20 minutes to pull through a straw, sits exactly in the cup holder, and is heavy enough to actually work as breakfast. They made the shake thicker instead of sweeter, and moved the machine to the front of the counter so commuters didn't have to wait behind people ordering full meals. Whether sales actually moved after that is itself disputed, Ulwick has claimed in print more than once that the case never produced the results the story implies, which by this point in the post should feel almost fitting. That case, published in the early 2000s, gave Jobs to be Done its widest audience yet, through *The Innovator's Solution* (2003) and a 2005 Harvard Business Review piece. Even then, Christensen wasn't done refining it. In 2016, 13 years after his first popular treatment and 31 years after Drucker's original phrase, he published *Competing Against Luck* with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan, the fuller, more complete statement of the theory, the one most people actually mean when they cite "Christensen's Jobs to be Done." The idea kept moving. That same year, Alan Klement published *When Coffee and Kale Compete* (free to read at whencoffeeandkalecompete.com), pulling Jobs to be Done into product design and UX, and landed on an observation that should sound familiar by the end of this post: a woman he interviewed had switched her morning coffee for a kale smoothie. Coffee and kale aren't in the same category by any definition anyone would draw on a whiteboard. They were still competitors, because they were both hired for the same job. Four years later, Moesta, who'd helped build the original theory decades earlier, published his own solo statement, *Demand-Side Sales 101*, extending Jobs to be Done into sales and demand generation specifically, not product design, not innovation strategy, the actual go-to-market motion. Moesta never put it down, either: he still teaches it at Harvard, MIT, and Kellogg, decades after helping build it. Hold that Klement observation for later. A demand strategist working in an entirely different room, on an entirely different continent of the marketing discipline, arrived at almost the identical insight about an entirely different pair of categories, about a decade after Klement did, with nothing to suggest either had read the other. It took 73 years and at least eight named people, and the handoffs weren't always friendly, several of the runners still argue in public about who ran which leg. Nobody reinvented the question, though. McGivena named the feeling. Levitt gave it an audience, and credited his source, a courtesy the field never returned. Drucker gave it words, for a narrower job than the one they ended up doing. Ulwick gave it a process. Pedi gave the whole thing its name. Christensen gave it a theory, twice, 13 years apart. Klement and Moesta each took it somewhere Christensen never did. Call it what it actually is: a 73-year relay, not a lightning bolt. The job never changed. Who was holding the baton kept changing. Hold onto that, because in a few paragraphs, a marketer named Wendell Smith is going to ask almost the identical question, who is this actually for, from across an entire market instead of one commuter's Tuesday morning. The same "who," asked from a different chair. --- ## The shape of the market You've seen the slide: four circles, each one labeled with a job title, an age range, and a stock photo of someone smiling at a laptop. Somebody built it at a strategy offsite. Nobody's opened it since, and nobody's ever been able to say which circle a given customer actually belongs to on a given Tuesday. Before anyone could ask this question with any precision, someone had to argue the market wasn't one thing in the first place. Smith did that in 1956, in the *Journal of Marketing*, arguing that heterogeneity, buyers wanting real, distinct things, was the rule, not an inconvenient exception. Grouping buyers by what they actually wanted was a legitimate strategy in its own right, not a workaround. Every segmentation deck built since traces back to this one paper, whether the person building it knows Smith's name or not. This is the market's answer to who, drawn from patterns across thousands of buyers at once. A different room, a few decades later, would spend a lifetime answering the same question from inside a single buyer's chair. A year later, a Lockheed mathematician working in corporate planning, not a marketer at all, asked a related but different question: not who's out there, but which direction should a company actually grow in. Igor Ansoff's 1957 *Harvard Business Review* piece, "Strategies for Diversification," gave four answers: sell more of what you have to who you already sell to, find new buyers for what you have, build something new for buyers you already have, or go somewhere entirely new. It's still taught as the Ansoff Matrix. Almost nobody teaching it mentions he wasn't a marketer. Three years after Ansoff, Levitt asked the shape question at the scale of an entire company, in the 1960 Harvard Business Review essay "Marketing Myopia." The railroads didn't shrink because people stopped traveling, he argued. They shrank because railroad men assumed they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business, and handed their customers to cars and airlines without ever seeing them as competitors. He pushed it further than most people remember: there's "no such thing as a growth industry," he wrote, only companies organized and operated to create and capitalize on growth opportunities. If you've ever watched a leadership team go quiet when someone asks what business we're actually in, you've watched a 66-year-old essay still working the room. And yes, this is the same Levitt from the drill quote one section back, in this lineage twice, once for the essay he wrote and once for the line he borrowed, credited, and got credited with anyway. The drill line is the same idea at product scale: nobody wanted trains, either. Smith had established that slicing the market was legitimate. Eight years later, Daniel Yankelovich argued about where to draw the lines. His 1964 Harvard Business Review piece, "New Criteria for Market Segmentation," made the case that age, income, and geography were the traditional cuts and the wrong place to stop: buyers' attitudes, values, and patterns of usage draw truer lines through a market, and he walked through ten real product markets to show it. Every psychographic and behavioral segmentation since runs on that extension. Those four circles with the stock photos are what happens when a deck keeps Smith's permission and skips Yankelovich's criteria. 13 years after Smith, Kotler took the pieces sitting around by then, segmentation, targeting, positioning, and welded them into one sequence he called the essence of strategic marketing. The year was 1969. The same year, on the other side of the country, two ad men were writing an article that would eventually become a different foundational idea, positioning itself, the actual placement inside a buyer's mind rather than the market-slicing step that precedes it. Neither camp cited the other. Same year, same underlying instinct, arrived at from opposite directions. 11 years after Kotler, Derek Abell gave the shape question its clearest formal geometry yet. *Defining the Business* (1980) argued a market only comes into focus once you map it along three axes at the same time, which customer groups you're serving, what needs they actually have, and what technology delivers on them. Most strategic confusion, Abell argued, comes from picking one axis and quietly forgetting the other two exist. It's the same instinct running through this whole section, just wearing a cube instead of a slide deck. 35 years after Abell, a consultancy founded by a man named Bruce Henderson asked a version of the same question again, at a completely different altitude, and there's no evidence anyone at BCG in 2015 was thinking about their own founder's other famous framework while they did it. Michael Silverstein, Dylan Bolden, and Dan Wald published "Demand-Centric Growth," arguing the occasion someone's in when a need shows up determines consumer choice more than demographics do. A demand space is that occasion itself. Mats Georgson took that idea one step further with what he calls demand point constellations: a single occasion doesn't just hold one need, it can bundle several at once, and the brand that understands the whole bundle wins more of the occasion than the brand that only understood one piece of it. The callback lands right here. Georgson has also argued, more recently, that if you sum up buying behavior across an entire year without separating out the actual occasions inside it, you can end up with results that look absurd on their face. His example: enough Netflix subscribers also use Uber, also drink Coca-Cola, also wear jeans, that by pure purchase-overlap logic, Netflix's real rival might as well be trousers. Klement made almost the identical point about coffee and kale, a decade earlier, from product design instead of brand strategy, and there's no sign either of them had read the other. Two rooms, two categories, one observation: category boundaries are a filing convenience. Occasions are real. --- ## A place in the mind David Ogilvy went first, in a 1955 speech in Chicago, before anyone had a name for what he was describing. Every ad a brand runs, he argued, should build one consistent symbolic identity rather than a pile of disconnected messages. He proved it rather than just claiming it: the Hathaway shirt campaign ran for 21 years off a single eyepatch, and the Rolls-Royce ad about an electric clock is still cited nearly 70 years later. Ogilvy called it brand image. He wasn't describing positioning yet, that's a distinct idea, about where you sit relative to competitors rather than how consistent you are on your own. But it's the direct decade-earlier ancestor of it. Between brand image and positioning sat Rosser Reeves, running the Ted Bates agency and hammering one idea into the culture: the unique selling proposition. His 1961 book *Reality in Advertising* made it doctrine. The recipe was to find the one claim a competitor couldn't make and repeat it until the whole country could recite it, which is how a candy shell became "melts in your mouth, not in your hands." The two ad men who come next knew exactly what they were inheriting, and said so. Their own history of the field runs in eras, Reeves' product era, then Ogilvy's image era, then the positioning era they were about to announce, which makes them the rare figures in this post who published their own family tree while claiming their place on it. Positioning got its name in June 1969, in a trade magazine most people have never heard of, *Industrial Marketing*, in an article that ran under Jack Trout's byline; Al Ries, his partner at the same agency, built everything that came after with him. Trout's diagnosis came first: "We have become an overcommunicated society." Too many products, too much noise, and the strategies that had worked before were no longer landing, because there was simply too much competing for the same mind. Positioning, the article argued, isn't what you do to a product. It's what you do to the mind of the prospect. Nobody noticed much at the time. Three years later, a speech Ries gave to the Sales Executives Club of New York caught the attention of an *Advertising Age* editor, who commissioned a three-part series. "The Positioning Era Cometh" ran in April and May of 1972, and that's the version that actually caught fire, hundreds of articles arguing for and against positioning followed within months. It took nine more years for the idea to become permanent: *Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind*, 1981, four million copies, 22 languages. The same core insight, refined three separate times over 12 years before the world agreed it was finished. In 2009, 40 years after that first magazine article, Ad Age's own readers voted it the number one marketing book ever written. Even their own claim to have coined the underlying idea is contested, some credit Ogilvy with getting there first. Nobody contests how many times Ries and Trout went back and sharpened their own idea before anyone else got the chance to. It's the same pattern Christensen ran on Jobs to be Done, a first version, then a fuller one 13 years later. Apparently even the person who owns an idea has to keep re-earning it. Kotler already has a claim on this word, from the shape-of-the-market section above. His STP sequence, segmentation, targeting, positioning, put the word into print as the last step of his own framework the same year Trout's trade-magazine piece ran, neither camp aware the other was doing it. Ries and Trout get remembered for the word because they built a book and a movement out of it. Kotler used it for something narrower and quieter, the final step in a sequence rather than a standalone claim on the buyer's mind. Same word, same year, and only one of them still gets asked to define it in interviews. The original article also gave marketers four practical rules: find the people in your own company who actually understand positioning, be brutally frank about your product's real reputation, change what needs changing, and build a program big enough to actually get noticed. 55 years later, in 2024, Mark Vandegrift and the team at Innis Maggiore restated those same four rules for a modern audience, in response to a reader's question. Not independent rediscovery: Trout mentored the agency's CEO for decades and dedicated his 2008 book to him. Positioning is a business strategy, not a board-room slide, built around customers and competitors rather than internal politics. It starts with the name and directs the whole brand portfolio, and every part of it comes back to a single word: focus. It's the same four ideas, sharper language, from inside the house Trout helped build himself. Not everyone who came after Ries and Trout was simply refining them quietly. In 2017, April Dunford published a piece with a title that says exactly what it means: "Everything You Know About Positioning Is Wrong." Her target was a specific assumption baked into the classical model, that positioning is something a company decides and then does to a market, marketers declare a position, launch a campaign, and defend it. Dunford argued that assumption had aged out. Customers now hold real power through social media, feedback arrives in hours instead of months, and markets reshuffle competitors constantly. None of that was true in 1969. Her alternative: positioning has to be iterative, built together with the product rather than imposed on top of it, and sometimes means reframing the market itself instead of competing inside its existing lines. Two years later, she built the process that made her revised version usable. *Obviously Awesome* (2019, updated and expanded in 2026) turned that argument into a 10-step, repeatable method built specifically for B2B tech companies, tested across the 300-plus she's consulted with directly. She's not an academic and she's not a strategy consultancy. She's a practitioner who did two things most people on this list only do one of: she named exactly which part of the old model had stopped working, and then she built the replacement. Ries and Trout still own the word. Ask most working product marketers, the ones running positioning workshops this quarter, who actually coined the term, and most won't know the answer, an ordinary gap, not a failing on their part. An idea can win completely, own the entire mindspace of a concept, and still lose its own authorship along the way. Nowhere else in this post does that happen so cleanly. Positioning wasn't the last word on winning the mind, though, and what came next wasn't a layer built on top of it. It was a direct challenge to it: does a buyer actually register the differentiated position you spent a career building at all, or does something more mechanical decide who gets chosen. Andrew Ehrenberg started answering that in 1959, fitting a statistical distribution to real purchase data and proving buying behavior follows a describable pattern rather than pure persuasion or pure randomness. 25 years of further work by Ehrenberg, Goodhardt, and Chatfield led to the Dirichlet model in 1984, the formal mathematics behind double jeopardy, natural monopoly, and the loyalty patterns almost every category shows. Byron Sharp gave that 51 years of accumulated empirical work a name, a book, and a mass practitioner audience in 2010: mental availability. You've felt it firsthand without naming it. Your phone dies on a road trip and you need a charger fast, and one brand's name is just already in your head before you've consciously chosen anything, decades of unnamed mechanism, working quietly, long before Sharp gave it a word. Three years later, Jenni Romaniuk applied the Dirichlet model directly to build measurable benchmarks for it, connecting Ehrenberg's original statistics straight into brand-equity practice. Neither Sharp nor Romaniuk invented the underlying pattern. Ehrenberg had been documenting how buyers actually repeat-purchase since 1959. They gave it a name, a framework, and an evidence base large enough that it became impossible to ignore. Sharp is also where the two halves of this question collide, and the collision is personal. He's told the story himself: he read Ries and Trout's *Positioning* as a marketing student and believed it, "they were so sure of themselves and the examples seemed compelling." The doubt came later, from the data. Decades of purchase panels convinced him that buyers barely register the differentiated positions marketers spend careers building, and he eventually said so in print, crediting Ries and Trout for proposing ideas clear enough to test while publishing the evidence against them. Dunford revised positioning's playbook. Sharp disputed its physics, and that argument, differentiation versus distinctiveness, is still being fought in public today. Refinement is how most of this lineage moves. Rebellion is the other way, and it only comes from people who sat in the previous room long enough to believe it first. Ritson sharpened the disagreement in a 2026 conversation with Sharp, and named the flaw underneath most differentiation advice directly: Michael Porter, he argued, "conflates being different with being unique. Those two things are not the same thing." Sharp's own answer wasn't full surrender. He'll grant that relative differentiation exists, this delivery is faster, this bottle is taller, but insists it rarely operates at the level of an entire brand. The fight hasn't ended. It's gotten more precise about exactly what the two sides disagree on. The mechanism of mental availability, what a brand actually needs to be remembered by, has its own separate root, and it comes from the agency side rather than the academic side. Jean-Noël Kapferer named "Physique," the visual and sensory manifestation of a brand's identity, colors, shapes, sounds, packaging, back in 1986. The academic wing circled the same ground from the money side, David Aaker's *Managing Brand Equity* in 1991 and Kevin Lane Keller's customer-based brand equity model in 1993, both asking what a brand's hold on memory is financially worth rather than what it looks and sounds like. Young & Rubicam built an entire measurement tool, the BrandAsset Valuator, around brand distinctiveness in 1993, with the word "asset" literally in its name. Romaniuk published *Building Distinctive Brand Assets* in 2018, 32 years after Kapferer and 25 after Y&R, giving the idea its most precise name yet, Distinctive Brand Assets, and a measurement framework built on two tests: fame, how many category buyers know the asset, and uniqueness, how many link it to your brand alone. She didn't invent sensory brand recognition, agencies had been building it for decades. What she made it was something you could actually audit. --- ## Worth the trouble Nine years before Porter's first answer, Henderson had already answered a narrower version of the same question, inside his own consultancy. Which of a company's businesses deserve more investment, and which deserve to be milked or cut. Stars, cash cows, dogs, question marks. Created inside BCG in 1968, made public in Henderson's 1970 essay "The Product Portfolio." It looks like a shape-of-the-market question at first glance, four boxes on a grid, the same instinct as a segmentation deck, but every business in that grid is being judged on one basis only: is it worth the company's continued money, not what kind of customer it serves. Porter answered a fuller version of that same worth-winning question twice, six years apart, at two different altitudes. In 1979, "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy" gave the industry-level version: five forces, buyer power, supplier power, new entrants, substitutes, rivalry, that together determine whether an entire industry is worth competing in at all, before you've picked a single customer to chase. In 1985, *Competitive Advantage* zoomed in from the industry to the firm, breaking a company down into discrete activities, the value chain, to find where advantage actually lives inside the business rather than assuming the whole company is equally strong everywhere. Read closely, these are two different questions wearing one author's name. Five Forces asks whether the industry is worth entering at all. The value chain asks how a firm inside it actually builds an edge, an operational question, not an economic one, and it's the one Bain is about to borrow next. 13 years after that second book, Bain's Orit Gadiesh and James Gilbert applied Porter's activity-breakdown logic to a question he never quite asked: not where does advantage live, but where does profit actually concentrate. Their 1998 case is U-Haul. Through the early nineties, U-Haul ran an older, higher-maintenance fleet of trucks painted the same orange and white you still see on the highway today, charged lower prices than Ryder, Hertz-Penske, and Budget, and barely broke even renting them out. The truck was the trap. U-Haul's actual operating margin was 10%, more than three times the industry average, and it lived downstream of the rental agreement. Once a customer signed, they became a captive buyer for boxes, insurance, trailer rental, storage, the accessories nobody comparison-shops for. U-Haul kept rental rates low on purpose, to maximize volume into the part of the business where the real money sat. Ryder sold off its fleet in 1996. It never found the same math. Gadiesh and Gilbert's companion piece works the same idea with real numbers on a hypothetical regional bank, breaking the entire U.S. consumer-financial-services industry into three activities, acquisition, funding, and servicing, and pricing out a $60 to $70 billion total profit pool two independent ways until the numbers reconciled. It's rigorous. It's also, by name, never once connected to Porter. Neither Bain paper mentions him. But the very first step of their own methodology is "determine which value-chain activities influence your ability to generate profits," which is Porter's own term, applied to a question Porter's original work stopped short of asking. Accurate to say profit pools is built on Porter's value chain. Inaccurate to say Bain ever said so. A consultancy selling a revolutionary new methodology has a real incentive not to mention it's a decade-old textbook applied to a new question. Ten years before Bain's paper, a different pair of authors had already asked a version of the worth-winning question from a completely different direction: not which activities hide the most profit, but which customers are worth the most over time. Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone's 1988 *Database Marketing* is where "customer lifetime value" first appeared in print with fully worked examples, the direct ancestor of every modern segmentation model that ranks buyers by economic value rather than demographics. Four different rooms, three different decades, one question asked from four different angles: is this worth winning, and by how much. --- ## The whole thing, put back together Four questions organized everything you just read: what job is actually being hired, what's the shape of the market that job sits inside, how do you win a place in the mind, and is it worth winning at all. The framing is ours, not Porter's or Kotler's or Martin's, built by studying what modern demand frameworks were actually answering underneath their own jargon, then finding the same four questions showing up again and again across 152 years once we went looking. Now go back through what you just read, because two of those four are closer than the section breaks let on. Smith asked who's out there, across an entire market. McGivena, Levitt, Drucker, Ulwick, Pedi, and Christensen spent 73 years asking who's out there too, one buyer at a time. Same question. Different floor. Nobody in either lineage seems to have noticed they were asking it about the same person. Ries and Trout said you win the mind by being different. Sharp spent a career proving buyers barely notice, and said you win the same mind by being remembered, through a completely different mechanism. Those are two rival answers to one question, still being fought over in public. And Porter published two supposedly connected questions under one name, six years apart, only one of which was ever about whether the industry was worth entering. The other, the value chain, was about how a firm builds an edge once it's already in there, an operational question wearing an economic question's coat. Bain noticed the seam, borrowed the operational half, and went looking for where the money actually sits. Four questions was the right count. Half of them don't stay put, though, and nobody flagged that going in: they either turn out to be the same question at a different altitude, or two questions wearing one name. This is the thing I actually want you to take from this post, more than any single date or name in it. The fights on this list, Ries against Sharp, Ulwick against most of the rest of the JTBD lineage, still arguing decades later over whose definition of a "job" is the real one, Bain quietly walking off with Porter's tool, are mostly two people standing on different floors of the same building, each one certain they can see the whole thing. Smith is on the market floor. McGivena's whole lineage is on the one-buyer floor. Nobody in this post ever built an elevator that reaches all four floors, and most of them never even checked whether there was one above or below the one they were standing on. It isn't a coincidence that this rhymes with work already on this list. Kotler's segmentation, targeting, positioning sequence is close to it. So is Roger Martin's own strategy cascade, five choices in order, a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, what capabilities have to be in place, what management systems keep those capabilities real. Where to play, in Martin's language, is shape-of-opportunity and worth-winning folded into a single choice. How to win is everything in the middle section of this post, mental availability, distinctive assets, positioning done right, still arguing with itself about which floor is the real one. Two different rooms, not reading each other, arrived at the same underlying structure. That's the whole argument of this post happening one more time, live, about the post itself. Martin's own estimate, from 40 years of consulting inside companies most people would recognize, is that only 10 to 15% of large organizations actually have all five of his boxes settled and reinforcing each other. The rest have what he calls a laundry list, a pile of individually sensible initiatives that never add up to an integrated set of choices. His line for it: "the currency of planning is initiatives, the currency of strategy is choices." Most practitioners have never read the book, 13 years old now, and it's a useful five-box version of the same pattern this post just spent several thousand words tracing one framework at a time. Read it, though it isn't the one true version this post was secretly building toward. A fair question is hiding under all of this, and I'd rather ask it than wait for you to: does knowing any of this actually make your marketing better? McGivena's name will not move your pipeline on Thursday, and no CFO has ever approved a budget because somebody correctly dated the Dirichlet model. I think the payoff is real, but it lives one level down from the trivia. Provenance tells you how hard you can lean on a claim. Positioning was argued from case studies picked to persuade, mental availability from purchase panels built to test, and that's a difference in evidence, not automatically a difference in truth, but you should know which kind of ground you're standing on before you bet a budget on it. Lineage also breaks the spell of framework fashion. Once you can see that a revolutionary new methodology is a decade-old idea with better typography, you stop paying revolutionary prices for it, in fees, in reorgs, in credibility spent convincing your own team to adopt it. There's a sharper version of that same payoff sitting in a real meeting: the next time someone on your team insists a framework is wrong, check what floor they're standing on before you agree with them or fight them. Half the arguments in this post, and probably half the ones in your next roadmap review, aren't wrong answers. They're right answers to a question asked one floor away from the one everyone thinks they're settling. And underneath all of that sits the plainest payoff: the tools keep churning and the questions don't. Everything in this post will eventually get renamed by somebody. The questions underneath the renaming have held for a century and a half. Churchill told the Royal College of Physicians in 1944 that "the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward." Yes, I checked, he really said it, which by this point in the post you'll understand I had to. Learn the tools lightly and the questions deeply, and the churn stops costing you much of anything. Nobody on this list invented these questions, ours, Martin's, or Kotler's. Wanamaker didn't know he was answering one when he printed a guarantee in 1874. Hopkins didn't know it when he key-coded a coupon. Ries and Trout didn't know they were competing with Kotler for the same insight the same year, on a different floor than they realized. What they were all doing, whether they knew it or not, was sharpening a tool somebody else had already picked up first. So are we. It took walking the whole 152 years to see how many of the fights on this list are really the same fight, argued on two different floors, by people who never checked whether anyone was standing above or below them. Two more questions still sit outside everything above, how do you actually execute the choice you made, and how do you defend it once you've won, and given what just happened to four, I wouldn't bet on those two staying simple either. They'll get their own post, in time. What's next is narrower: a closer look at the 73-year Jobs to Be Done relay above, one post, one lineage, all the way down, the same way you might get for positioning, mental availability, and the rest of the questions on this list. --- ## The Monday Version Next time someone pitches you a framework like it fell out of the sky, ask one question before you adopt it: what is this actually a new name for? That question isn't there to dismiss it. Sharper names and sharper tools are how this whole field moves. But you'll use it better once you know whose shoulders it's standing on, and you'll stop mistaking a fresh coat of paint for a new building. --- Opening Folders, JD --- *Every date, quote, and attribution in this piece was independently verified against primary sources, not accepted on any source's own self-description. Originally published on [Open Folders](https://jdprater.substack.com).*