What is market positioning?
Market positioning outlines what businesses must do to market their products or services to the target customers. It involves the ability to influence consumer perception regarding a brand or its offerings relative to competitors. The primary objective here is to establish the brand identity or image in order to change consumer perception in the desired manner.
Types of market positioning strategy
An effective market positioning strategy encompasses advertising, branding, promotion, pricing, product development, and sales and distribution. Some of the common types of market positioning include:
Customer needs
This type of market positioning strategy involves identifying the company’s target customers and how they intend to satisfy customer needs. This can include the functionality of the product and the experience that they gain from using the product.
Customer perceptions
It is always beneficial for brands to capture the imagination of their customers. This not only helps create a lasting impression on the minds of the customers but also help the company to better plan their market positioning strategy.
Brand recognition
This is one of the most commonly used types of market positioning strategy wherein a brand promotes some basic visual symbols and information associated to itself in such a way that customers easily recognize the brand through these symbols/information. For instance, the logo of Mc Donald’s is unique, and its eye-catching yellow logo is enough for customers to recognize the brand.
Pricing
Pricing is a primary strategy used for competition. Except for luxury goods, markets for most other goods are price sensitive, however, customers do not want to compromise on the quality. So, companies that offer goods at a lower price and with a reasonable level of quality tends to win in most markets. Furthermore, one of the key ways for brands to outperform competitors is with the superior level of quality.
Customer service
Customer services prior to, during, and after the course of purchase is one of the key factors that lead to better market positioning. Customers favor companies that offer better customer service, this is especially true in the case of goods such as electronics and automobiles wherein customers spend more time before making purchase decisions.
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Use or application
Market positioning strategy based on the use or application of the brand involves positioning a product depending on the uses that customers can derive from that product. For instance, for several years Nescafe positioned themselves as a winter product and extensively invested in product advertisements during winters. However, the advent of cold coffee has urged them to build a market positioning strategy for summers as well. Introducing new uses and applications of a product is a measure undertaken deliberately in order to expand the brand’s market.
How to create an effective market positioning strategy?
Building a market positioning strategy is essential for businesses to identify how their brand is perceived in the market and making necessary changes to change these perceptions in the desired manner. Experts at Infiniti Research have listed out some key techniques for brands to create an effective market positioning strategy:
Determine the USP
Unique selling proposition (USP) sets a brand or its products apart from their counterparts in the market. Companies must make efforts to compare and contrast the differences with that of the counterparts in the market. Increased emphasis should be given to the strengths and how they can be leveraged to exploit the available opportunities.
Identify current market position
Analyze the company’s current market position. This helps determine if any changes are required in the current market positioning strategy. In case any changes are required, it also helps determine how new positioning will be beneficial in setting the company apart from other players in the market.
Competitor positioning analysis
Businesses must analyze the current conditions in the marketplace the amount of influence that each player in the market can place on each other. This gives a better picture of who the company is competing against in the market and what their key strategies are.
Develop effective market positioning strategy
Once the company has identified what their brand is and how they are different from competitors, the next step is to evaluate the market conditions, and other opportunities and threats in the market. This way the company has to decide how they wish to position themselves in the market.
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