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A collection of article and ideas that help Smart Marketers to become Smarter
What is Positioning in Marketing Strategy?
As consumers or buyers are permanently exposed to commercial messages (sales, advertising, products, ...), your brand should clearly stand out of this clutter and deliver its promise. This is the big idea behind positioning. But how to do it? For a new product? For a new company? For a new line of business?
What's the big idea of POSITIONING?
Be clear where you play and how you play! A positioning statement is NOT a brand tagline or a Mantra!
Where do you play?
Where you Play means the category where your products and services will be sold. While the category is something originally designed for managing the relationship between retailer and supplier, the main idea is that you should define the environment where your products/services will be sold (discrete groups of similar products and services).
How do you play?
Positioning could be to make the brand virtually synonymous with the product category so that it is the brand that comes to mind when consumers think of the product. Examples include Xerox, Kleenex, and Scotch tape. Often the brand that stands for the category is the sales and profit leader in that category. In many cases, such a position is gained by being the first brand to aggressively advertise and promote within the product category.
The category is also referred to as frame of reference in the HBR article[4].
Brand positioning starts with establishing a frame of reference, which signals to consumers the goal they can expect to achieve by using a brand. In some cases, the frame of reference is other brands in the same category.
A good positioning statement makes it clear who the customer is and what business problem they need to solve. If you do a good job of defining the customer problem, you don’t need to describe your product. The customer will want to learn more in the next conversation. Harvard
Effective positioning should be simple, meaningful, and unique. Simple concepts such as "thickest ketchup" (Heinz), "easy to use" (Macintosh computers), and "tough off-road" (Jeep) are easier than more complex formulations for consumers to process and associate with the brand name.
Positioning must also be meaningful to the target audience. Positioning such as "comfortable jeans for women" (Lee jeans) and "inexpensive air travel" (Southwest Airlines) work well to the extent that these concepts strike a responsive chord with target customers.
A good positioning statement makes it clear who the customer is and what business problem they need to solve (HBR[3]). If you do a good job of defining the customer problem, you don’t need to describe your product. The customer will want to learn more in the next conversation
Finally, effective positioning should be unique within the product category. The positioning "reliable," for example, can be used in a number of product categories such as watches (Timex), appliances (Maytag), and automobiles (Honda). But within any single category, it is difficult for two brands to own the same concept in consumers' minds.
Rules of the Game
It is simple, memorable, and tailored to the target market.
It starts with the customer problem and not from the product.
It has a clear frame of reference.
It has clear points of parity with other brands from the same frame of reference.
It provides an unmistakable and easily understood picture of your brand that differentiates it from your competitors (points of difference).
It is credible, and your brand can deliver on its promise.
Your brand can be the sole occupier of this particular position in the market. You can “own” it.
It helps you evaluate whether or not marketing decisions are consistent with and supportive of your brand.
It leaves room for growth.
Template
For [insert Target Market], the [insert Brand] is the [insert Point of Differentiation] among all [insert Frame of Reference] because [insert Reason to Believe].
For [your target] who wants / needs [reason to buy your product/service], the [your product or service] is a [category] that provides [your key benefit]. Unlike [your main competitor], the [your product/service] [your key differentiator]
Questions you could ask
Examples
ZipCar: To urban-dwelling, educated techno-savvy consumers [target], when you use Zipcar car-sharing service instead of owning a car [competitive frame], you save money while reducing your carbon footprint [points of difference].
Gazelle: At Gazelle, we pay you for the cell phones, iPads, Macs,and other Apple devices you no longer need—helping you upgrade faster or just putting a little extra cash in your pocket.
Amazon (2001): For World Wide Web users who enjoy books, Amazon.com is a retail bookseller that provides instant access to over 1.1 million books. Unlike traditional book retailers, Amazon.com provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and comprehensive selection.
Pitfalls as described in HBR[4]
1. Companies sometimes try to build brand awareness before establishing a clear brand position. You have to know who you are before you can convince anyone of it. Many dot-coms know this pitfall well. A number of them spent heavily on expensive television advertising without first being clear about what they were selling.
2. Companies often promote attributes that consumers don’t care about. The classic example: For years, companies that sold analgesics claimed their brands were longer lasting than others. Eventually, they noticed that consumers wanted faster relief more than sustained relief.
3. Companies sometimes invest too heavily in points of difference that can easily be copied. Positioning needs to keep competitors out, not draw them in. A brand that claims to be the cheapest or the hippest is likely to be leapfrogged.
4. Certain companies become so intent on responding to competition that they walk away from their established positions. General Mills used the insight that consumers viewed honey as more nutritious than sugar to successfully introduce the Honey Nut Cheerios product-line extension. A key competitor, Post, decided to respond by repositioning its Sugar Crisp brand, changing the name to Golden Crisp and dropping the Sugar Bear character as spokesman. But the repositioned brand didn’t attract enough new customers, and its market share was severely diminished.
5. Companies may think they can reposition a brand, but this is nearly always difficult and sometimes impossible. Although Pepsi-Cola’s fresh, youthful appeal has been a key branding difference in its battle against Coca-Cola, the brand has strayed from this focus several times in the past two decades, perhaps contributing to some of its market share woes. Every attempt to reposition the brand has been followed by a retreat to the former successful positioning. Brand positioning is a tough task. Once you’ve found one that works, you may need to find a modern way to convey the position, but think hard before you alter it.
In the Marketing Canvas
In the Marketing Canvas Process (more information here), you have to clarify your hypothesis for achieving your revenue goals.
You have 3 potential scenarios, non-exclusive for achieving this: GET, KEEP, and/or MORE (read our article on scenarios).
You should also define the underlying hypotheses of these scenarios: Your positioning as a player (leader, challenger, or game-changer), reasons to believe (brand, differentiation in VP), and your pricing position (cheaper, market price, premium).
A New Whole Brain Customer Experience
Reposted article from https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/whole-brain-marketing
Author Sid McGrath, Chief Strategy Officer, Karmarama, discusses the importance of customer experience for brands.
Reposted from https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/whole-brain-marketing
Sid McGrath, Chief Strategy Officer, Karmarama
A consequence experience
The customer experience for brands is driven by consequence: when customers have a good experience they continue to engage with the brand; if the experience is bad they disengage, often telling others about their disappointment and spreading a message of general discontent.
This makes for some pretty precarious brand relationships. However, the issue that so far no-one seems to be addressing is that the very notion of the customer experience is fundamentally flawed.
A disconnected, transactional experience
Marketing leaders see customer experience as their number one priority, but they are rarely in control of all of it, or even enough of it to make a difference. Recent focus on using digital technology to influence customer purchasing decisions is causing some companies to concentrate too narrowly on the customer’s interaction with a brand at the moment of sale. These ‘experiences’ can be relentlessly sales-focused and annoyingly interruptive. Organisations calling themselves customer experience experts encourage companies to increase the number of transactional messages, but is this really leading to better, worthwhile and relevant experiences for the customer? The fact is that global use of adblockers is rising while trust in brands is rapidly declining.
Reducing a person’s relationship to a brand solely to that of a ‘customer’ demonstrates a lack of understanding about the role that brands actually play in our lives. A transactional focus also shows a brand’s hand: their audience is perceived as a wallet ready to be picked or a purse ready to be opened, rather than a person to be understood, respected and served.
A human experience
What then is the answer? To start with, people must be respected as human beings with fairly low thresholds for unwanted buying messaging. This doesn’t mean no messaging; it means messaging that is empathetic to the individual and to the context. With this in mind the customer experience can then be reimagined as the human experience, from CX to HX, where a brand’s pathway into people’s lives is fully understood and delivered with relevance rather than persistence.
The transactional experience previously locked into consumption and category gives way to one that connects with culture and allows for meaningful, useful and relevant communication, with the selling left to the right place and the right time.
A fully-connected experience
If the human experience is the answer, how do we get there? Again, it’s about understanding how humans, and more specifically, how our brains, work.
The brain is an astonishingly connected piece of hardware. As much as we may try and separate it into left and right hemisphere, or occipital and frontal lobes, or neocortex and limbic system, every part of the human brain is connected to another part to improve its understanding and response towards any situation. This connection ensures an integrated response, a mix of logical and emotional consideration, instinct and intelligence.
The interconnectedness of the brain serves as a model for understanding how to create better, balanced and truly human experiences for brands. Approaching any experience with a whole-brain mentality means finding a way to connect everything with everything, from consumption to category to culture. This is how humans see their world — fully connected — so it stands to reason that it’s also how they should engage with their brands and how brands should engage with them.
Now consider once again the classic customer experience — an experience that ushers customers through the consumption and category phases of their relationship with a brand, but stops short of connecting to the culture of the wider life they lead.
Without the insight and intelligence required to understand the implications — the consequences — of the brand experience, the experience itself breaks or, worse, is biased towards buying rather than being. This is the fundamental reason why customer experiences are disconnected.
A meaningful experience
Once a brand is able to connect to a person’s wider life, understand and respect them as a human rather than a data point or part of an algorithm, and can connect that back to the category and consumption phase of the relationship, there emerges a new type of powerful, meaningful, connected human experience — one that people will actually want rather than one that will frustrate them.
So, paradoxically, we don’t live in the age of the customer; they are not “king”, “queen” or “the answer”. We need to move to the age of human, to human-centricity where what the human wants and needs can be fully, relevantly connected to the relationship that brands want to have.