Jack Trout

Trout coined positioning as a marketing term in a trade journal article in 1969, then built it into a book with Al Ries in 1981 that reframed advertising around the space a brand occupies in a customer's head rather than around the product. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing compressed that argument into rules stated as certainties, which is both why it sold and why academics dislike it. He ran a consultancy in Connecticut and advised governments as well as companies. He died in 2017.