Product Positioning: Meaning, Examples, Importance And Steps
Making a product popular among the consumers of a market is necessary for a successful business. Businesses often struggle to…
February 12, 2022 | 5 mins read
Making a product popular among the consumers of a market is necessary for a successful business. Businesses often struggle to reach their customers despite having products that effectively solve consumer problems. Product positioning is a viable tactic that all entrepreneurs must consider to achieve success in business.
Product positioning is a key tool in the marketing function of selling a product. To do this well, you first need to understand the meaning of product positioning. Product positioning is defined as a form of marketing that presents the feature of the offering, product, service or venture to its target market in a way that persuades them to engage and interact with it. Marketers can pick tools like market research surveys and focus groups to ascertain the target consumers’ choices. Based on the results, marketers can come up with enhanced marketing techniques.
Research can also determine which features and specifications of the offerings please customers the most. This leads to a more streamlined and effective marketing plan. Such plans tend to accrue better leads and sales because they prominently bring out the noted and desirable features of the offering.
Once you’ve understood the meaning of product positioning, you can even position products among multiple sects of target groups. Different groups may find the offering desirable for different features. Marketers can create different campaigns for each such target group.
An example of product positioning is advertising. Consider a product intended for mothers. The community of mothers becomes the target group for this offering. Considering this target audience, the product could be advertised through social media sites (Facebook and Instagram) or online forums that discuss parenting, childcare.
Defining product positioning reveals that product positioning is a rather crucial segment of the marketing strategy for any offering. It has many advantages and contributes to generating leads and sales. Its effectiveness can be fully gauged through the examples of product positioning discussed later. Product positioning is important for a variety of reasons, a few of which are listed below:
Product positioning is a strategy adopted to market an offering to a specific target group. Identifying this target group for a product is useful throughout the life of the business. This helps in devising after-sales services, and it can be harnessed for further R&D and brand development.
When your brand or product is positioned effectively, you offer your customers something different instead of adding to the market noise of similar products. Your brand provides an enhanced alternative to what others already offer, making you look different. An example of product positioning in this case would be standard notebooks that come with an attached case for storing writing material.
Businesses that follow product positioning tend to have a deeply focussed understanding of the narrowly filtered problem they’re trying to solve. Without product positioning, your business would come up with solutions to very generic problems, most of them ineffective. Product positioning will also enable better, noteworthy interaction and engagement with your target customers.
Understanding customer challenges brings better opportunities for the organization. It creates newer avenues to spearhead R&D while providing better scope to develop and enhance currently offered products and services. This way, the brand can pivot and drive solutions to identifiable problems for their existing set of customers. This will also bring in extended members of the target audience.
Product positioning serves as a differentiator for one business from its competition, setting the brand apart. This means that potential and current customers are more likely to recollect the brand, especially when marketed in terms of the problems it solves, enhancing leads and sales. Advertisements with catchy slogans can serve as an example of product positioning that tries to create an indelible image for itself.
An undefined and incomparable position in the market often leaves no benchmark for price comparisons across competitors for consumers, regardless of what price is being charged. Once the differentiation aspects are clear to the customer, valuation is generally ignored since consumers find the offered benefits worthy.
Product positioning allows a business to filter its customers, offerings, marketing strategies and perspectives. Creating a distinguishable position for a product allows the business to identify the shape the brand should take.
A brand with focus often directs to more impactful decision-making. Decisions are better guided with creative thinking and steer solution-driven processes in the right direction.
Taking cognizance of these aspects brings out the true importance of product positioning and emphasizes the need to capitalize on its advantages.
Product positioning is a stepwise process. The steps in product positioning have been listed below:
Understanding the customers’ needs, wants, demographics and interests allows a business to provide the product and service the consumers strive for. By paying attention to such preferences, a business can understand how to market its products and earn a brand reputation among the consumer class. Achieving this requires conducting well-rounded surveys.
Benefits of a product are of critical significance to the customer, as they convey the effectiveness with which the customer’s needs can be met. You need to identify the perks and advantages of your product and highlight them in your marketing strategy.
While you focus on leads and sales, it’s important to build a reputation and generate goodwill. Customers are likely to come back to a brand that’s credible and reputed. It’s also necessary to keep innovating and achieving excellence in the niche created for your product offering.
Once the above steps in product positioning are followed, the brand position must be maintained so that customers continue buying its product. To keep this up, avoid drastic price fluctuations and never compromise on quality. Factors that allow you certain advantages in manufacturing better and cheaper products should be harnessed. Maintain your competitive advantage and make sure your brand is always effectively positioned.
These steps will help any business effectively capitalize on the advantages of product positioning.
Building a personal brand necessitates drawing careful cognizance of the tactic of product positioning. Understanding the meaning, definition and steps involved in product positioning will certainly aid in setting your personal brand apart and gaining great market value. Harappa’s Build A Personal Brand pathway will help you build and strengthen your brand. Be a thought leader in your field. Branding yourself as a trustworthy expert is the way forward for all professionals who want to make a difference.