Product Positioning Strategies
Product positing strategy is the process of employing marketing effort on target market to create firm offerings value in the mind of the target customer. It is necessary to create a place of product in the market along with production. As a marketer, you can apply various product positioning strategies. Simply, also called product positioning type or positioning decision.
The frequently used product positioning strategies are:
- Positioning on product-specific features or characteristics
- Positioning on product benefits
- Positioning on specific usage occasions
- Positioning for user category
- Positioning against another product
- Positioning on product class dissociation
- Positioning on the product price
- Positioning on product quality
Positioning on Product Specific Feature
The first product positioning strategy you may apply is positioning on product-specific features or characteristics. While marketing the product you need to describe your product’s specific features, why it is unique from others, why these unique features matter, etc. to your target customers.
Your product’s specific feature could be specific quality, design, price, service, and any other attributes that particularly give a specific feature to your product. This strategy may help you to build up your organization’s image in the market.
Positioning of Product Benefits
This is another one of the important product positioning strategies. In this strategy, you can mention the significant benefits of your product that can obtain any buyer when using it. In this strategy, many companies focus on adding various benefits to a product.
The product benefits may be durability, reliability, convenience, economy, efficiency, peak experience, etc. And, it is believed that this positioning strategy may create the needs in the minds of the customers for that particular product.
Positioning on Specific Usage Occasions
You can also position your product in the market on the basis of specific occasions. Here, the marketer seeks to position his product on the basis of the specific usage situation of the target market. When you want to position your product on birthday, is one example of occasion positioning.
A marketer may target on many occasions of his target customers such as birthday, engagement, marriage, special festivals, picnic, weekend, etc. For this, he has to understand the intention, what people need to have on their special occasion, etc. The uniqueness of occasionally offering may bring more sales to the firm which leads to increase profit and market share also.
Positioning on User Category
In this, the marketer or business firm deals with certain specialized products and focuses on some specific users. Here, a marketer wants a product position in a specific market segment. For e.g. a marketer focuses only on girls under 10 rather than focusing on both all girls and boys.
A marketer can make his campaign only for children, where he is only inviting children customers. Some may advertise as ‘remember for quality product and service’, here they are inviting only high-class people who require quality product and services. Also, some may advertise as ‘remember for low priced products, here they are inviting low-class people who need cheapest products and can not buy expensive products.
Positioning Against Another Product
As its name suggests, in this positioning strategy a marketer wants to make his product’s position over competitors. The marketer wants to messages the target customer that his product is more qualitative or better than others.
It is just like jumping into a competition. To make better quality, may a marketer has to modify all the settings including raw materials, production system, marketing mix, after-sales service, etc. It may be costly while restructuring all the settings. However, when the marketer becomes successful he will earn competitive profits as well as may bear the loss as there are very high opponents. Because, sometimes this type of product positioning strategy, instead of building a company’s image, damage its goodwill or image in the long run.
Positioning on Product Class Dissociation
To attract more customers, sometimes firms may offer some irrelevant or separate but useful and beneficial message for the same product or service.
For example, the authorities of Chitwan National Park may offer target groups for “sightseeing for wildlife animals.” At the same time, they may offer target groups for “recreation park” or “best research park for wildlife animals”. Here, although the offers “sigh seeing or wildlife animals” and research parks are irrelevant or separate in nature, some people may go to the park for sightseeing, some for recreation, while some may go for various research purposes.
Positioning on Product Price and Quality
In the market, people are of both types – price sensitive and quality sensitive. Price-sensitive people believe that paying a high price for the product is a waste of money. While buying products they always focus on price, which means they ignore the quality of the product. And they buy the product at having a low price.
Whereas, quality-sensitive people believe that higher-priced products have higher quality. They assume product quality and price have a direct relation. While purchasing the products, they prefer the quality either the price is very high, they have believed that they are using the product that has no side effects on their health.
So, while marketing the marketer can use both product positioning strategies by understanding the nature of the target customers.
To sum up, the use of the above-mentioned product positioning strategies largely depends upon the nature, size, situation, objective, and resources of the business firm. The firm can either select a single positioning strategy as only positioning on product feature, or combine two or more strategies as “positioning on product feature and benefits”, or “positioning on product quality at affordable price” and so on. Firms may build up their image either by offering a single competitive advantage or a unique bundle of competitive advantage that appeals to a substantial group within a segment or target market.