What Is Product Positioning?

Product positioning is a vital component of any business’ marketing plan. This term is the process that marketers use in order to decide how to best convey their products’ attributes to their target audience based on customer requirements, competitive pressures, available communication channels in addition to carefully crafted key messages. Effective product positioning ensures that marketing messages resonate with target consumers and compel them to act.

What Are Product Positioning Strategies?

The aim of product positioning is to ensure that your product is kept at the top of your customers’ mind when they’re contemplating a purchase. In order to achieve success, three objectives must be accomplished:

1. Distinguish your product from the competition’s
2. Address essential customer buying criteria
3. Clearly articulate key product (or company) characteristics

Product positioning is a key ingredient in the buying process. This means that it should never be left to chance. It’s an opportunity for you to have an impact on the market’s understanding of your products. Failure to address product positioning proactively is unlikely to end well.

With or without your feedback, customers will place your product—possibly based on information from your competitors, which will not put you in a good light. Clear, concise, as well as meaningful product positioning, also assist you to cut through the relentless advertising in addition to the marketing noise of the marketplace. In your customer’s mind, product positioning provides your messages with some context so they can be better heard and accepted. Marketing messages – in addition to positioning – have a lot in common.

What Should Happen In The Product Positioning Process?

During the process of creating product positioning strategies, periodically review each one against the following list of characteristics:

• Is your product positioning strategy: Single-minded – does it convey one primary message at a time?
• Meaningful – will it connect with the target audience?
• Differentiating – does it contrast your strengths against the competition?
• Important – is it pertinent and significant to the target audience?
• Sustainable – will it resonate with the target audience well into the future?
• Believable – will it ring true with the target audience?
• Credible – are you able to clearly substantiate your claims?

The following is a list of some already-created product positioning approaches.

• Reflect on your product in terms of each one and then see how they fit against a competitor. Pitting your product directly versus a competitor’s usually requires a specific product superiority claim. A truly memorable example is Avis Rental Cars’ We’re #2. We try harder.
• Positioning your company as the opposite of your competitor can assist you with getting the attention in a market which is dominated by some other product. A well-known example is 7-UP calling itself the Uncola. The benefit of this strategy is that it focuses on a benefit your product provides to your target audience. Examples include Volvo’s emphasis on safety and Colgate toothpaste’s focus on reducing cavities.
• Highlighting a particular attribute of your product can also be exciting. For instance, Ritz Carlton hotels focus on luxury; Formula 1 focuses on the economy.
• Equating your product to a product in a different category could be an efficient way to differentiate your brand. In a soap-compares-itself-to-lotion advert, Palmolive dishwashing liquid claims that it softens your hands while you do the dishes.
• This type of positioning stresses when or how your product is utilised by your target audience. Jeep’s focus on off-road driving is an excellent example.
• Focusing on the unique characteristics of particular users can also be effective. The …For Dummies series of instructional books are attractive to people who want to learn about a topic from a source which doesn’t assume any prior knowledge on the reader’s part.

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