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Table Of Contents
Page No.
Introduction 1
What is Positioning? 1 - 2
Why is it important? 2
What kind of strategies we can use to overcome this obstacle?
Being a leader 2 - 3
Being a follower 3 - 4
Repositioning your competitors 4
What is the best name that would fit your product or company ? 5
How can this help us as marketers? 6
Conclusion 6
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Introduction
For many years students has been taught that a good marketing plan starts
with a research and because customer differ they have to be segmented and
since you can’t be perfect in all segments you need to target a certain group
but before targeting there is still one more step you need to be able to fulfill
your marketing plan and that is positioning.
Positioning is able to affect the product, the price of the product, the promotion, and the place it is sold in.
Today marketing is no longer a stable order but a changing one in which positioning is one of those changes that makes the market alive and
exciting. But who needs positioning while we still have advertising that is enough to send the message to the customer. Is advertising enough to position ourselves in our prospects mind as #1 and what is positioning that has become one of the most important strategies of marketing?
What is positioning?
If you look up in the dictionary for the word position you will find that position means your place or rank in society, in a group, or in a race or competition.
This means that positioning is not something you do to the product but what position the product holds in your prospects minds. Positioning your
product may need you to change the name, price, and even the package but these are not changes in the content of your product but merely a change in
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the features for the sake of positioning yourself in your prospects minds.
Once you understand the concept of positioning you will be able to get ahead of your competitors but if you failed to understand it your, competitors will beat you in your own game. Now we are left to the question Why is it important?
Why is it important?
The answer is today we live in an over communicated society full of many products, businesses, me-also products advertisements and so what a mind actually does is filter much of the information that is received and reject most of it and accepting only those which match earlier experience. Thus if a mind is made up you can’t change it therefore don’t spend much money trying to change the minds of your prospects through advertising instead try to understand why they think this way?.
We are able to increase the volume of communication but are we helping the consumer to cope with all these information that is presented to him/her this shows that communication in itself is a problem. So you see no matter what you do to advertise your product does it really reach the customer the right way you wanted it to reach your customer. This leaves us wondering what kind of strategies we can use to overcome this obstacle?
What kind of strategies we can use to overcome this obstacle?
Being a Leader
Suppose your a leader in the market for computers, and your company is called “High Tech”. To keep this position you should avoid making advertisements saying that you are No.1 because the consumer already knows that instead try to enhance your product in the mind of your
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prospects, if a new innovation comes out forget your ego and try to use it in favor of you product showing to you customer that the product he/she buys has the best and newest innovations in it, don’t ever think that power of the product is derived form the company it is actually the reverse, give each brand a unique name positioning it differently than other brands you have, don’t line extend since this will kill your products at the end because the customer will not know what your product stands for.
For example suppose you made a computer and called it “High Tech” and then you made a scanner and called “High Tech’ and then you made a printer and called it “High Tech” too so at then end what does your product stand for? is it scanners, computer or printers?.
This actually blurs the position of your product in the prospects mind instead of sharpening it so why blur it when you have it!.
Being a Follower
What if you are not a leader in this market what are you going to do? with all the me-also products there is no more room for new products or innovations everyday thousands of new business are established and new products appear and a lot more of me-also product. You don’t want your products to be a me-also, you want a position just like Phillip Morris and IBM but how are you going to do this?
Well , To be like those big positioned companies you need to make a new product that has not been taken by someone else in the mind of the prospect. How can you do that ? find a hole that which means if people think that they should go east to find a hole left by competitors for example find if you can find something in the west. just think in reverse. This hole could be size, price, promotion, gender whatever it take to be positioned first seize the opportunity and sometimes the best strategy is so simple and obvious yet
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no one noticed it because it is too good to be true .Our mind has a way of finding complicated and tough strategies better than simple and easy ones.
Timing is very critical remember when Phillip Morris introduced Virginia Slims cigarette it was between the 1960s and 1970s this was the feminist era women were still being treated unequally so they took cigarettes as a symbol of rebellion, and equality which in turn increased sales of Phillip Morris so you can see why timing is critical.
Don’t try to fill a gap between your products if you found that there is a gap, fill the gap in the mind of your prospects and not your products. They are the ones who are going to buy the product so be careful with what you fill.
Repositioning the you competitors
Another way to find a hole is to reposition your competitors. I t means to put a new product in the prospects mind you must first remove the product of your competitors. Once the old idea is removed people will tend to fill the old idea with a new one which can be easily placed.
To reposition you competitors products you must say something about your competitors products that will cause doubts in the minds of you prospects therefore when you introduce your product they switch to it. Try to avoid putting chemical names on your products this might scare people away from your products and once people take this ideas about a product there is no way to back from it or try to change it because there will always be that bad mark on your product in your prospects minds so you are better off if you kill the product than if you try to enhance or promote it.
When advertising stop comparing yourself to your competitors because the minute you do that you are on the road of a disaster why? Because consumers will think if you are the best how come you are not No.1?.Try to avoid this question.
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What is the best name that would fit your product or company ?
Back then when there were few products you didn’t need to choose a perfect name because there were few products that prospects could remember but what about now? You are in big trouble because there are millions if not billions of products which is obviously hard for a consumer to remember and would need a lifetime learning to remember all these products. What can you do is choose a name that is descriptive, easy to remember, Sharpe, and generic-like hence blocking the way for your competitors. Don’t do like a soap in Egypt called Fax. What is this? Is it a fax machine or what? Because even if it was a fax machine we know it is a fax machine and we don’t need to call it fax. does this soap send oils and dirt’s away quickly tell me because I really don’t understand.
There is another name mistake a company in Egypt did was call a yogurt drink Zabado this isn’t nice name to remember, it is too heavy to spell actually most of the names in Egypt either end -o- or –ana- that is downsizing the limit of naming and making it ridiculous. A name may get out of fashion so be ware of it not to leave any hole for competitors, again timing is critical.
Another thing that people are not aware of is that there are names that people think of as losers, you see what you expect to see so choose the appropriate name, Don’t make the mistake of calling yourself a name which later you find out that another company has it and ever since you are being confused for the other company.
Many companies fall for the no-name trap where instead of using a name you use initials because your name is obsolescent, or may be because managers are using initials to save paper and space while writing in memos and because they are in contact with it they assume everybody knows it well this is unlikely to happen. You have to be a well known company before you change your name to initials.
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How can this help us as marketers?
This can help us understand the way people think. It shows us how to be able to communicate to customers the product successfully and stay No1 for as long as we can in the prospects mind. It also helps us to think of better names to apply for either a company or a product and never fall for the trap that everybody falls for. Sometimes a simple answer is all we need to be successful over our competitors that is why positioning helps us see these simple and easy strategies which may go unnoticed by others. It helps us communicate our customers even in an over communicated society.
Conclusion
After I read this book I agreed with it at once because I do believe communication has become a very big issue businesses face everyday. With too many products it became almost impossible to find a hole where you can place your product into.
Positioning is becoming one of the most important strategies of our time to be able to market products but for how long because there once used to be an image era which disappeared after me-also products then there was the product era which also disappeared the question we are left wondering about is for how long will positioning strategy stay until a new strategy is needed to attract the prospect to our product? and will there be any strategy at all? As you can see the trend in clothes fashion is tending to go back in time so are we going again to go back again to the image or product era after the Positioning era?!.