How to Nail Positioning

Once a marketer has identified the financially optimal target group, the next step is positioning. In an increasingly cluttered environment where buyers have very little time to ponder product decisions, products and services that stand for something important or remembered for something significant have an advantage.

A powerful positioning leads to a powerful brand. But positioning is a difficult concept because it embodies the value proposition — the bundle of benefits and attributes a company wants to offer buyers at a certain price to positively differentiate the product or brand from competitors.

It’s a message so clear, so succinct but so powerful that, once launched; it begins to move customers and prospects toward the brand. Most importantly, it is a message to the target group. Usually, the positioning is a one- or two-sentence statement — even a word — that captures the message a marketer wants to imprint in the minds of customers and prospects. It describes your product or service and how it is different from — and therefore better than — the competition’s.

Examples of long-running positioning strategies for companies or brands include:

• Easy to use—Apple Exceptional

• Performance for driving enthusiasts—BMW

• Softness—Charmin tissue

• Authentic, real, original—Coke

• Guaranteed next-day delivery—Federal Express

• Wholesome family entertainment—Disney

• Improves the quality of life—GE

• Strength—Hefty plastic bags

• Accepted everywhere—Visa

• Safety—Volvo

• For the youthful, hip generation—Pepsi

• Thrills and excitement for preteens and adults—UniversalStudiosTheme Park

• Nutritious, low-fat, low-calorie food—Healthy Choice

• Pure, clean, natural—Ivory Soap
• Good value for family meals—Taco Bell

At its core, positioning is the reason why people buy one product rather than another. They believe it offers greater value, strength, prestige, fun, safety or nutrition (or some combination of elements) than another product or service.

If marketers had unlimited time and a prospect’s undivided attention, they could tell him everything about the product or service.

But a company does not have endless time, and prospects are notoriously inattentive. The most any business can say are those few things prospects care about and will remember.

Marketers want to fix a succinct message in people’s heads to induce trial and use among prospective buyers or reinforce current purchasing among current customers. Positioning is valuable because when you have it, the other marketing elements follow naturally: pricing, marketing communications and promotion, and distribution.

As you segment a market, simultaneously investigate all potential attributes and benefits that might motivate customers in a category. These include all the ways a business can differentiate itself: product, service, personnel, and image.

At this point the company does not know if any of them actually motivate behavior. The goal is to generate a long list of attributes and benefits that might form the basis for a powerful positioning strategy. These should represent both attributes and benefits of the product and tangible and intangible facets.

To uncover these attributes and benefits, a company might do a category scan, exploratory research, personality assessment, social values analysis, emotional exploration, or some combination of all five:

A category scan is a close review of all the attributes and benefits, tangible and emotional, that competitive brands in the category employ.

Exploratory research includes focus groups, in-depth interviews, or both. The focus groups do not produce the positioning, but rather ideas for the list of attributes and benefits. Marketers should not rely on the outcome of focus groups to make the final positioning decision.

Personality assessment is an analysis based on primary or secondary data on the key personality traits that potentially underlie behavior in the product or service category. Since there are literally thousands of potential personality traits, it takes an expert to provide some insight into which ones might be relevant in the product category and to select the measures of those relevant traits a study ought to include.

Social values analysis breaks social values and how they drive human behavior into eight categories. A marketer can establish how relevant each of these values is to consumers either directly, by measuring relevance in a research study, or indirectly, by inspecting secondary sources closely.

Emotional exploration looks at people’s psychological needs and how a particular product or service category addresses them. All of these techniques are just as appropriate for business-to-business as for consumer marketers and appropriate for both services and products

Finalising the Positioning Decision

Like the targeting decision, the positioning decision is not one that should be made in a one-hour meeting. Since the items on the list become the elements of the brand’s positioning and the connecting threads of an entire strategy, the list must be as all encompassing and creative as possible.

Once a company has a list, management reduces it so it can go into a questionnaire to determine how motivating each of the attribute and benefit characteristics is to the market target and how buyers perceive competing brands on each of them. After marketers discover what motivates consumers and the perception of their products or services and those of competitors, they can rank-order a final list of category characteristics or potential positioning themes.

Now the task becomes a creative one. Marketers develop a message strategy that puts the product or service in the most positive light. From there the advertising and marketing communications people go to work.

Formulating the remaining components of marketing strategy should reflect the needs, interests, habits, and behaviors of the target group and the motivating attributes of the positioning.

As emphasised throughout this page, building a marketing strategy takes time. We often hear marketers say, “I don’t have time to do the research. I need to make a decision now!” They go on to make decisions based on intuition and gut-instinct about what they feel customers want.

Yet these same marketers somehow find the time to make the same decisions over again later when the marketing plan is not working. They make the same mistakes repeatedly, rather than try to get it right in the first place.

These marketers have learned the hard way that, while just about anyone can make a decision, not everyone can turn the decision into a sustainable competitive advantage and profits. Those that have discovered and sustained an advantage recognised the critical nature and inherent complexity of the components of marketing strategy.

Many tools and technologies exist today to help marketers make these complex decisions; all that’s required is the will to use them.

Summary

In order to continue to thrive, companies must acquire and keep customers. As a result, marketing and sales has become an area of increasing focus for companies of all sizes.  Creating an effective marketing strategy is based on a five-step process:

• Step 1: Understanding the market climate and marketing strengths and weaknesses

• Step 2: Developing a marketing strategy

• Step 3: Building a marketing plan

• Step 4: Implementing the plan
• Step 5: Monitoring the success of the plan

Real marketing strategy provides a roadmap to creating and delivering true value to distinct groups of customers. All successful marketing strategies must begin and end with the customer—they cannot be an afterthought or taken as a given—so marketers must test their assumptions about their customers constantly.

In this best practice article, the author provides an in-depth marketing strategy overview including identifying market segments, developing effective messaging and creating a positioning strategy.

What you can expect:

Mental agility, intellectual rigour, creativity, professionalism and outstanding results.

• A professional research, targeting and positioning plan, including ideal client and target market analysis, a route to market, strategy, tactics, time-scales, and implementation and measurement.
• A professional strategic marketing plan, including mission statement, vision, analysis of the market opportunity, product and services, and financials.

Please allow 24 – 48 hours for a response.  Thank You