Positioning Strategy

Positioning Strategy

The success level of any marketing strategy of a company can easily be determined by its positioning strategy and the steps taken by the company in implementing it. That’s why choosing a particular strategy is always a difficult task. Moreover needs proper attention in identifying the factors. Actually that might interfere with the rate at which the goal will be achieved. Once the formulation stage of the strategy draws near its end. Then the next objective that concerns the marketers is determining the steps involved in positioning. Even through which you want your brand out in the market.

How to Apply Positioning Strategy

Competitor Analysis

Competitors are an important aspect of any business in the market. It is a fact that your competitor is always your best helper. Therefore at times, it surely pays to take time in analyzing your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. For this purpose, one has to go back to basics like the type of market. Basically both the company and its competitor is targeting. Thus advancing slowly but continuously to the influence of each. Therefore the effect on the influence because of one another.

This can better be illustrated with the help of an example. Let’s say you are running a gaming company known for its high quality and interesting games. Moreover you just have to launch a new third-person shooter game. So, how will you see the competitor in the market? Well! Obviously, it is going to be like this:

1. Other third person shooter games in the market by the competitors
2. Any other type of shooter games, like the first person
3. Other types of games excluding shooter games (since they will also be taking a portion of your customer base)

Now here, one thing is extremely important to consider and that’s the difference between primary and secondary competitors. Primary competitors are the competitors that relate to the same business field of your brand. Also promote the same kind of product like yours. While on the other hand, secondary competitors are the ones who work on the other kind of the products while relating to your brand in the same market.

Observing the Competitor

Next step to a successful positioning strategy is to get a view of how your competitors are perceived and how they are evaluated. Since it lets you get an idea of which feature of their product is bringing them customers and which one of them is “ruining” their business off. But for the purpose, one has to choose an appropriate, but narrow, set of attributes to go any further because trying to focus on more than one thing at a time can only just slow the process down.

Once the choice of the attributes has been made, it’s time for you to observe what’s going on down there. And it’s not just the competitor that you need to observe but also customers’ taste and their behavior to a particular product type. Don’t worry about the time that this step is going to take from you, since it is surely going to worth itself.

Determining the Competitors’ Positioning

Proper functioning of this step is possible only through a careful choice of the attributes in the previous step. This step involves determining how other brands along with yours are positioned in the market and what their performance level is. This step lets you understand what they think about your brand and how they feel about other ones? Moreover, it is also important that you classify your competitors in terms of similarities and dissimilarities. Even though you can cover up this step by yourself in a subjective manner but for getting reliable results, you should prefer thorough research about this.

Analyzing the Customer Base

Even though, in nearly all of the previous steps, you have to keep an eye on the customers’ tastes and put forward the steps for tackling the change, if one occurs. But this step is the different one since it is fully dedicated to analyzing the customers. In this step, you have to perform the customer analysis by keeping following questions in mind:

1. What is the segmentation pattern of the market?
2. How important is the product type to the customer? Does it belong to the category of the products of daily use or something that customers don’t use much often?
3. What motivates the customer in buying the product from you or your competitor?
4. Are there any relevant habit changes and behavioral patterns?

Getting an overview of the segmentation is an extremely important process towards formulating a powerful positioning strategy.

Making Critical Decisions

In this step, all of the information gathered through the above four steps is put to good use, in paving up the way towards a finalized version of positioning strategy. It is extremely important to gather accurate and reliable information on those steps since those will be what is the basis of which the decisions for positioning will be made.

A great strategy is only possible if economic analysis carefully guides the decisions. If one method of doing the business is performing better than the rest of the methods, then it’s better if the marketer sticks to that method while fixing up the behavior of other methods on the way. It is always better to keep this thing in mind that your brand will do the best of itself only if you let it be, what it is. Moreover considering the set of symbols in a positioning strategy is also important to do so.

Monitoring the Position

All of your hard work and the energy that you put in formulating the winning positioning strategy will just go to trash if you just leave after its implementation. Instead, you can keep an eye on it while it is feeding your business on a never ending customer base and make changes to it according to conditions. Not just this, it is also worth mentioning that just observing also does the job sometimes.