Mind over matter

The shutting down of the home-grown micro-blogging platform, Koo, offers valuable lessons to budding entrepreneurs on how not to position their products. While its founders may say that they sank because talks for a partnership with multiple large companies failed, the reality is that nobody bets on a losing horse. For a horse to be a winner, its positioning is the most important. Marketing and branding gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout, in their masterly 1993-work, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, had demonstrated how me-too products never work. The first principle is that it works better to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone that you have a better product than the one that got there first.