What is market positioning?

[MUSIC] Market positioning is an important facet of marketing practice. It involves designing a company’s products or services in such a way that they occupy a meaningful and distinctive area in the mindsets of consumers. As markets have become more global and more competitive, it’s important that organizations make an attempt to carve out their own niches. Let’s take a closer look at positioning and discuss what it involves. Competitive positioning is all about perception, specifically, the perception of consumers and how these perceptions compare and contrast with the perceptions the market may have about competing products and services. It’s important to acknowledge that these perceptions may occur

on a number of levels: at a company level, where one organization may be perceived as fast moving and dynamic, while another is sluggish. At the product level and at the brand level, where a company such as Virgin has managed to carve out a particular brand identity across a wide portfolio of products and services. If done well, marketing communications can go a long way to helping organizations achieve favorable market positions vis-a-vis their competitors. As consumer impressions and perceptions are all important, very often, it’s not the inherent merits or demerits of a particular product or service that can make or undermine reputations, but the messages use to convey brand qualities and how these messages are decoded by the target markets.

It’s a difficult process to do positioning well. Marketing guru, Philip Kotler, has warned of some common positioning errors and how they can frustrate marketing strategies. If a brand is under positioned, people don’t quite understand what it’s all about and how it differs from the competition. Over positioned runs the risk of appealing to too narrow a market segment. Often, positioning strategies can be confused with marketers trying to invest too many qualities into the identities of their brands and doubtful positioning strategies can result if consumers don’t quite believe that an organization’s lofty claims about their product or service stack up. Very often, market positioning strategies can manifest themselves in a graphic format.

In these visual formats, marketers try to rate their product or service attributes on a two-dimensional scale so that they can seek to understand how they compare to the competition across factors such as perceived quality, customer service, peace of mind, affordability, and so on. To conclude, as Kotler described it, positioning is the act of designing the company’s offering and image so that they occupy a meaningful and distinct competitive position in the target consumer’s mind. In competitive markets, it’s more important than ever that organizations successfully stand out from the crowd through well-considered competitive positioning strategies. Five key points for the bit. One, competitive positioning is all about customer’s perceptions.

Two, positioning may occur on a number of levels, including organization and brand levels. Three, marketing communications can help to reinforce competitive positions. Four, positioning is a difficult thing to do successfully. Five, marketers may try to map out how their product or service race against the competition in graphic formats.