POSITIONING STRATEGY

WHAT IS STRATEGIC MARKET POSITIONING ABOUT ?

is about deciding, building and communicating your unique proposition to your target audience in everything you do. It comes useful at the time of creating your value chain as well as in making your marketing, sales and service efforts.

• How it helps your customers : Your consistency reinforces them to remember you when the trigger situation / application comes up.
• How it helps you : it helps you to think - at all stages of setting up, running and communicating - why a customer would want to do business with you, what do you offer that the other producers don't and what needs of the customer you wish to serve

THREE COMPONENTS OF A POSITIONING STATEMENT ?

You have a positioning statement when all 3 components as below are put together

1. What are your strengths and competitive advantages ?
   What significant difference does it make to your customers?
2. Who is your target customer and their needs?
   What significant difference can they make to you?
3. How are you different from your competitors ?
   What significant difference does it create that your customers will value greatly?
   In other words, what is your unique selling proposition? Your competitive advantage?

HOW ARE POSITIONING STRATEGY STATEMENTS USED ?

• Basis for all marketing plans, marketing messaging, websites, recruiting, training, sales conversations. It also helps create branding at the corporate level.
• It helps create an important asset of the business : strong relationship / referral customers which are necessary to build our reputation.  Customers who trust us to serve their needs and who defend us. For them to do that, they need to know what we stand for. They had a good experience with us, but time passes. They forget. But if they see our messages, our positioning and our actions, they remember and are pleased to do business with us, again and again.
• Positioning may appear as a sentence, paragraph, or a page but think of it as a seed – it is very small but it ultimately determines everything about the tree that will come out of it. But it succinctly defines who is the target customer, their ‘pain points’ that we need to address, the category in which the company competes, the specific competitors we must address, their differentiated benefits,  what the company must do to ‘prove’ those differentiated benefits to the customers.

Positioning is undoubtedly one of the simplest and most useful tools to marketers. After segmenting a market and then targeting a consumer, you would proceed to position a product within that market. Positioning is all about 'perception'. As perception differs from person to person, so do the results of the positioning map e.g what you perceive as quality, value for money

WITHOUT POSITIONING YOU CANNOT

1. Search for your competitive advantage
2. Have a basis for creating focused strategies
3. Have a basis for selecting or rejecting long term capital / manpower budgets 
4. Distinguish your offer from its competitors
5. Conduct internal, market & competitor analysis
6. Plot competitive strategies

POSITIONING MAP

Products or services are 'mapped' together on a 'positioning map'. This allows them to be compared and contrasted in relation to each other.

Make a 2x2 map and decide a label for each axis : they could be price (variable one) and quality (variable two), or Comfort (variable one) and price (variable two). The individual products are then mapped out next to each other Any gaps could be regarded as possible areas for new products. Trout and Ries suggest a six-step question framework for successful positioning:

1. What position do you currently own?
2. what position do you want to own?
3. Whom you have to defeat to own the position you want?
4. Do you have the resources to do it?
5. Can you persist until you get there?
6. Is your long term value chain and short term tactics support this positioning?