What is positioning?
It is a marketing strategy that defines the position that the brand or business occupies or wishes to occupy emotionally and cognitively, namely, in the hearts and minds of customers about competing brands or businesses. It pertains to the identity, personality, and image marketing managers want their brand or business to have.
What must positioning represent for the customer?
It needs to represent value that can be either tangible or symbolic.
What is differentiation?
It consists of a brand or company standing out from others by getting the target customers to perceive it as different from the competition, in a positive sense, based on one or more significant attributes.
How does differentiation address the 4 P?
- Price: Billing and payment terms, the package offered, and credit and volume discount conditions.
- Product: the product or service offered in its variety, quality, the technology used, additional maintenance, repair, installation, etc.
- Place: geographical coverage, types of intermediaries that distribute the services or products and the image they project, and business hours.
- Promotion: image transmitted by advertisements and by other means of communication, loyalty programs, sales team, and direct marketing.
What happens after the segmentation?
- You choose which groups you want to target.
- You determine what appeals to them and position your brand that way.
What are the disadvantages of re-positioning?
It is expensive, and it takes time.
Give a conceptual example of re-positioning.
- Frog princes are rare: it is extremely difficult to reposition a well-known mid-range brand as a high-end brand.
- “people’s princesses” are familiar: taking a high-class brand and positioning it as mid-range is easier.
What are the conditions to ensure a successful positioning?
1) positioning must be consistent with targeting.
2) Positioning must represent tangible or symbolic value to the customer.
What are differentiation points of parity?
- Features of the product that are similar across competitors.
- Allow consumers to categorize the product.
- It is important to have some points of parity, so consumers understand what your brand or product does.
What is the perceptual map?
It is a way to optimize differentiation by finding your brand’s place in the market and comparing it to your competitors.
