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Positioning
is a marketing method for creating the perception of a product, brand, or company identity.
Beginning in 1969 (the term
was coined in a paper by Jack Trout:
Positioning is a game people play in today’s me-too market place,
Industrial Marketing, Vol.54, No.6, June 1969, pp.51-55)
two young marketing guys, Jack Trout and Al Ries, wrote, spoke and
disseminated to the advertising and PR world about a new concept in
communications called positioning.
Their 1981 book on Positioning: The
Battle for Your Mind became a
bestseller. Until then, agencies had primarily been basing their media
campaigns on internally conceived benefits of the client's
product.
According to Trout and Ries,
"positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do
to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position (place) the product
in the mind of the prospect". Since that time in marketing, positioning
is the technique in which marketers try to create an image or identity
for a product, brand, or company in the perception of the target
market. What matters is how potential buyers see the
product. It is expressed relative to the position of competitors.
Typical positioning tools include graphical perception mapping,
market surveys, and certain statistical techniques.
A successful positioning strategy is usually rooted in a
company's
sustainable competitive advantage. Positioning can be based on
several things, including:
-
product
features
-
benefits,
needs, or solutions
-
use
categories
-
usage
occasions
-
placing and
comparing it relative to another product
-
product class
dissociation
Conceptually, three bases of
positioning can be distinguished:
1. functional positioning (solve problems, provide benefits to
customers)
2. symbolic positioning (self-image enhancement, ego
identification, belongingness and social meaningfulness, affective
fulfillment)
3. experiential positioning (provide sensory stimulation, provide
cognitive stimulation)
Typically, a product positioning process involves the following
stages:
-
identify
competing products
-
identify the
attributes (also called dimensions) that define the product 'space'
-
collect
information from a sample of customers about their perceptions of
each product on the relevant attributes
-
determine each
products' share of mind
-
determine each
products' current location in the product space
-
determine the
target market's preferred combination of attributes (referred to as
an ideal vector)
-
examine the fit
between: the positions of competing products, the position of your
product and the position of the ideal vector
-
select optimum
position
Compare with Positioning:
Marketing Mix |
Extended Marketing Mix (7-Ps)
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Ansoff |
Porter Competitive
Advantage
|
BCG Matrix |
Product Life Cycle | GE Matrix
|
Innovation Adoption Curve |
Profit
Pools
|
Four Trajectories of Industry Change
More management models
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