Product Positioning Strategy: Definition, Examples And Types

When marketing a product or service, it’s incredibly important for it to be positioned in a manner that’s strategically beneficial for an organization. There’s a whole process behind a product positioning strategy. Read on to know the details of this process. Let us first begin by deciphering the meaning of the term product positioning.

What Is Product Positioning?
Importance Of Product Positioning Strategy
Steps In Product Positioning Strategy
Types Of Product Positioning Strategies
Conclusion

What Is Product Positioning?

Product positioning is a strategic marketing exercise wherein a parent organization communicates how the end-customer should think and feel about a particular product. This process decides how the product or service will fit into the marketplace and how it’ll be better than the available alternatives.

The purpose is to articulate how the product seeks to uniquely solve a recurring problem faced by the customer. Through messaging, the organization tries to nurture a brand image for the product that will help enhance the product value, going beyond features and functionality.

By repeating the product’s benefits to a potential customer, you enhance the perceived value of the product or service. Most often, organizations use communication channels, pricing and product quality to stand out and remain recognizable. Using product positioning strategy examples makes it easier to articulate the crux of the concept to the audience.

In this article we’ve mentioned product positioning strategies with examples, as well as the different types of product positioning strategies. With the help of product positioning strategy with examples, we seek to make this concept clearer for the readers.

Importance Of Product Positioning Strategy

There are only very few products that appeal to everyone. In line with this view, if an organization creates a marketing story that seeks to sell to everyone, it probably won’t resonate with anyone.

In fact, product teams need to understand their customer segment, and their messaging has to specifically resonate with this segment. This is where product positioning becomes tremendously important for organizations.

For instance, if you’re marketing clothing to upmarket customers, you need to steer clear of positioning the product as affordable. Therefore, creating messaging that highly resonates with specific customer segments forms the core of product positioning.

Steps In Product Positioning Strategy

The way customers perceive your brand is crucial to sales performance, the success of the business and the eventual profit the organization earns. This makes it important for products to be showcased as per the value it deserves in the market. These are the steps that need to be followed:

Define Target Audience: An organization must know beforehand customer needs, wants, demographics and interests. This makes it much easier to reach out to the target audience, which, in turn, encourages them to make a purchase.
Identify Key Benefits Of The Product: The messaging of a product has to be around the immediate and long-term benefits offered by the product. These need to be identified and communicated to the audience for them to make an informed choice during purchase.
Establish Brand Credibility: Create a brand that builds lasting relationships and nudges customers to make repeat purchases. This can only be possible through a product or service that customers can rely on. Usually, these are products with a good reputation and high credibility. Above all, avoid making promises that you can’t deliver on.
Offer Unique Value Proposition: Identify and recognize the most distinct value your product has to offer. Build the messaging around this factor and seek to project an enhanced brand value around this “unique factor” to the target audience to find traction.
Do Audience Segmentation: A better way of delivering value to your target audience is to segregate them into groups and create unique messaging based on each segment’s interests, traits and needs. This will open up hidden sales opportunities and appeal to individual needs.
Craft A Message: Once you’ve segmented the audience, reach out to them through multiple channels. Depending on the taste of the segmented groups, you’d be required to customize and craft a message as per the demand of each communication channel. Personalized and effective messaging will speak directly to the needs and preferences of the target audience.
Undertake Competitive Analysis: Take a peek at your competition to gain clear ideas on what makes your product positively different. This will enable you to improve upon your core values and innovate for the better to offer the best end-product to customers.
Demonstrate Expertise: It’s extremely crucial that you articulate how your product is better than others. Prove to the end-customer why it’s better to stick with your product and brand. This can be done through testing, trials and open demonstrations.
Maintain Product Position: Once you’ve established a brand position in the market, you need to consolidate your position so that customers continue with your brand. On the whole, avoid compromising on quality and increasing prices all of a sudden to make customers suspicious.

This section enumerating steps in product positioning strategy employs product positioning strategies with examples and types of product positioning strategies. Product positioning strategies with examples better outline product positioning to the readers.

Types Of Product Positioning Strategies

While organizations take a lot of time in product development, only select organizations think about making the customers perceive their product a certain way. There are various types of product positioning. Read on to know more about them and product positioning strategy examples:

Characteristics-based: Brands create certain associations with their products. This is done to enhance brand image. For example, individuals with safety as their primary concern will opt for Volvo, while those looking for reliability will go for Toyota.
Price-based: This involves associating a product with competitive pricing on account of lower shipping and distribution cost and large procurement. Examples include select supermarket chains like Reliance Fresh.
Quality-based: Certain products only focus on quality or prestige while doing away with the notion of price. A good example is Rolex.

These were some useful examples of positioning strategies.

Conclusion

We hope this article has given you definite insights about product positioning and why it’s important while launching a product into the market. Harappa’s Select A Strategy pathway will guide you on how to constructively brand yourself. This pathway will also help you learn techniques that would make it easier for you to make your presence felt in the workplace.