Positioning in Marketing Strategy – What It Means?

Do you ever wonder why some brands are highly successful and others manufacturing similar products aren’t? It may be due to many contributing factors such as low quality with a high price, poor marketing, an exhausted market, too much competition, or even a poor positioning strategy. 

How you position your product amidst the consumer’s mind and what value you offer are significant factors determining your success. Let’s take a look at the common positioning strategies with relevant examples.

What is Positioning in Marketing Strategy?

Positioning strategy is how a brand’s image is created amidst the target audience. It is a strategic process to define the brand’s uniqueness, its distinct benefits compared to the competition, and how the target customers perceive it. A good positioning strategy aids the marketing efforts. It provides clarity on how to place and promote a product, generate content around the product, and best appeal to the target buyer.

Importance of Positioning in Marketing

Do you know why people commonly refer to any toothpaste as Colgate or all instant noodles are called Maggi? Even the regular bandage is recognized through the brand band-aid. These are all great examples of successful market positioning. A recent example is Dolo 650, which is just another painkiller but was primarily marketed as the best means to combat headaches, migraine, backaches, body pain, etc.

Establishing a good positioning strategy has helped these brands and many others to build customer loyalty and identity, setting them apart from the competition, a justified pricing strategy, market differentiation, improved sales, and healthier customer relations. 

Here’s how brands have created the highly effective common positioning strategies:

1. Know where your brand stands: You must first know how your brand is perceived amongst the customers. If you are new in the market, you must research how the audience might perceive your product and what will make you stand out. Here, you will also identify your product’s benefits that nobody else has explored in the market. Benefits can be about quality, features, pricing, or target audience.

 2. Competitor Analysis: Next, you need to find out what similar products the competitors are offering, their USPs are, their successful marketing strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and position in the current market. 

3. Developing your brand’s unique selling proposition: At this stage, you create a positioning statement to declare your product’s uniqueness to the target audience. The positioning statement is developed considering your target audience, product category, benefits offered and valid proof of those benefits. After the positioning statement is ready, you will create a slogan or tagline that communicates everything about your product.

4. Connect with Your Target Audience: The next step is to market your product using the tagline and positioning statement you’ve created. Now is the time to effectively connect with your audience and understand their viewpoint, take feedback, and ensure the product solves the problems it was designed for. This will help establish your brand’s credibility and demonstrate your expertise.

5. Test and improve your positioning strategy: Now’s the time to evaluate whether all your hard work will pay off or was all in vain. This stage combines quantitative and qualitative research to solidify your marketing positioning and make adjustments wherever necessary.

6. Maintaining the positioning: The last step is to create relevant content and promote your product according to your well-defined strategy. Remember, your positioning strategy will only yield positive results when consistent with your efforts.

Factors Affecting Positioning in Marketing Strategy

Several factors contribute to how you can position your brand. 

The common factors affecting the positioning of a particular brand or product include:

1. The specific attributes of your brand or product
2. What the consumers expect from your brand. This largely depends upon the brand image you’ve created in the market.
3. The different features and usability of your competitor’s products.
4. Your pricing strategy
5. How consumers perceive your product.
6. How effectively you can market your product according to your positioning strategy.

Types of Positioning in Market Strategy with Examples

A brand’s positioning strategy is dependent on many factors such as its quality, relationship-building factors with the audience, a general perception about similar products, and so on. There are several positioning strategies in marketing, which can be used either individually or in several combinations to determine how the target audience perceives the products or brand.

1. Pricing

Price plays an important factor in determining how the target audience perceives your product or brand. The pricing of a product defines whether it will be treated as a luxury brand or just another brand offering necessities. However, with pricing, it is also essential to consider how the consumer perceives the value of your product. A brand may be classified as luxurious not just because of its high price but also because it offers exclusive products with limited access.

Examples of Positioning

Reliance Jio poses the best example of a well-defined positioning strategy concerning pricing, starting by offering free calls and internet while providing unmatched services that none of the existing brands provided gave Jio the distinct advantage of capturing a huge market (more than 300 million active users) during the first six months.

Another great example is the fashion industry. A user buying clothes or any other fashion accessories from Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, H&M, and any other exclusive brands wouldn’t buy from department stores. And customers mostly purchasing from thrift stores will always go for local brands that offer a certain quality and usability over distinction.

2. Product Attributes

The product or brand’s distinct features or USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is another way to determine how to position the product in the market. The focus here is on quality, its distinct style, the reliability it can offer, and its durability.

Examples:

Tesla entered the vehicle market by offering electric vehicles with a luxury sports model, offering two distinct advantages over the existing competition offering either economy electric cars or luxury cars that run on petrol or diesel.

3. Competition

A lot of brands position their products by comparing them to existing competitors. The idea is to make your brand, product, or service look superior to the one offered by existing and well-established competitors.

Examples: 

The constant battle between Wendy’s and Mc Donald’s is the perfect example of a competition-based positioning strategy.

The marketing efforts of Mercedes Benz in comparison to its key competitors Audi and BMW is another excellent example of a competition-based positioning strategy.

4. User Groups

Brands may position themselves as offering tremendous benefits only to a specific user group. The objective here is to showcase why and how the product offers a unique advantage to that particular set of users, usually something that others cannot provide.

Examples:

Johnsons target the baby care segment, offering a wide variety of products vital to a baby’s unique requirements for proper nourishment and care.

Adidas or Nike shoes worn by athletes create an image in the consumer’s mind that wearing these shoes will help them become more athletic or provide comfort while pursuing their favourite sport.

5. Applicability of the Product

Certain products can offer multiple uses in different scenarios, which can be an excellent positioning strategy. Products positioned to their applicability are usually perceived as highly convenient by the target audience.

Examples:

Meal replacement or supplement brands can provide usability for people lacking time to cook and eat nutritional meals, to those going to the gym and requiring additional nutrition, and even to those following a strict diet to remain energised even after consuming low-calorie food.

Tea manufacturers can offer cold or iced tea variants for the summers and traditional hot tea for the cold winter months.

6. Product Quality

If your brand offers superior quality to others in the same products without changing their price, it counts as an excellent positioning tactic in marketing strategy. People usually assume that good quality products come with a higher price, but some brands can provide exceptional quality without a significant price change.

Examples:

Both Target and Walmart offer the same type of products, but where Target can assure shorter queues and neatly set up racks, Walmart offers convenience with their stores in almost every neighbourhood.

Apple has always been a pioneer in providing quality, even when it comes to music, the only drawback being that everyone can’t afford it. Spotify changed this perception by introducing personalised playlists and free content for regular users. Their premium users still get the same or even better-quality music as Apple users at relatively the same price. Thus, Spotify targeted a broader user base than Apple.

Conclusion

Developing the right positioning strategy is no easy feat. However, it is crucial to establish a unique brand identity, boost sales and ensure a uniform customer appeal, especially if you are new to the market. 

The right strategy requires consistent effort, research, time, and the courage to say no if something doesn’t align with your principles. 

However, once you’ve created a successful brand positioning strategy and ensured it yields the desired products, you can again focus on making your product more innovative.