Positioning is not something that 'just happens' when launching an advertising campaign, but the result of a carefully designed mix of product / service, price, distribution, communication and promotion.
Three strategic decisions form the structure that, when maintained, allows flexible decisions to be made to add value to product and service brands.
Market Segmentation, equivalent to the identification of current or potential customers, whose purchasing behavior is similar to the same offer. Product Differentiation, which is the design of a significant set of differences that allows distinguishing the company's products / services from those of the competition. And the Positioning of Brands, that is to say, the way in which clients relate in their mind products and services that compete with each other.
Differentiation decisions are made internally in the company seeking to design a value proposition for the product or service that for a selected market segment is significantly better than that of the competitors. Positioning decisions refer to what the company wants to happen in the minds of customers in relation to that value proposition.
They are two decisions so closely related to each other that the difference between them may seem too subtle. However, the essential difference is that brand positioning, as resolved in the public mind, is the result of product differentiation. And this result is not necessarily as the provider intended.
To make this clear it is necessary, first of all, to visualize that the differentiation decisions made internally must be made known to the market to be served. Of course, that is something that is achieved through communication and leads to thinking about mass media advertising.
However, the term communication should be understood in a much broader sense; broader even than within the Comprehensive Communication context. So broad, that in fact it must be intimately linked to the mission statement of the company and the definition of the business to which it is dedicated.
Simply put, there needs to be a high level of consistency between what a business does and what a business says across all of its strategic and operational decisions. The operational decisions of product, price, place and promotion should all emphasize the competitive advantage that has been chosen to offer customers a specific value proposition.
This example can be used to show the way in which a company explicitly intends to achieve a certain position, based on its choice of market segment to serve and the advantages to differentiate itself from its competitors.
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This positioning statement follows from the company's mission statement, is perfectly linked to its definition of business and serves to guide all its daily actions, not only those related to its advertising.
Second, it is necessary to consider that the competition also tries to position itself in the mind of the target audience, who receives an excessive amount of messages, especially when considering the total communication to which it is exposed day by day.
The public's response is one of information oversimplification, as a way to eliminate confusion resulting from the excessive amount of messages and options available on the market. And this oversimplification is not necessarily equal to the differentiation that the company tries to make internally and against its competition.
The first step, prior to writing a positioning statement, is to know what already exists in the minds of customers, opening a virtual window that allows you to see how they have solved the communication problem.
A Perceptual Map is the graphic representation, in a two-dimensional space, of the relative position that competing products or services have among themselves, according to how customers perceive their similarities and differences on a set of significant attributes.
This map allows you to clearly see the location of the brands in the mind of the target audience, in relation to both the attributes or benefits they offer to their target segment, and in relation to the location of an Ideal Candy, that is, what children interviewed consider it to be the best that could exist in the market.
The second step is to answer the question, Where should the brand move? There are only three general strategies. Get closer to either the leading brand or the ideal brand. Get away from brands to differentiate yourself. Or, the most difficult thing, resizing the axes of competence on an attribute or benefit that is not currently offered by other brands.
Once the desired position is identified in the minds of customers, the positioning concept must be unique, meaningful, accurate and credible. In addition, it must be reflected in an explicit statement that allows monitoring whether the strategy is yielding results.
Technical note.
To obtain a positioning map, based on the results of a survey administered to a sample of the target segment, the technique of Multiple Discriminant Analysis, canonical version, is used.
Far superior to other statistical techniques (including correspondence analysis), this solution:
- It does not require a special questionnaire. It asks the interviewee to handle a dynamic very similar to his daily brand evaluation. It does not represent a burden for the interviewee neither in effort nor in time. It produces a very clearly defined perceptual space that is conceptually very easy to interpret. It exists as a software solution available in various packages. Your results are extremely stable across different data sets. It is the most used technique internationally.
In addition, it clearly offers the advantages of seeing the market through the eyes of the customer; Identify empty spaces and occupy them, locating the position of an Ideal Concept, at the same time that it allows to lay the foundations to carry out a segmentation by benefits.
