What Is Market Positioning?

Market positioning refers to the arrangement for products to occupy a clear, special and ideal position in the minds of target consumers relative to competing products. Therefore, marketers must design their positions to differentiate their products from competing brands and gain the greatest strategic advantage in the target market.

Market positioning

Market positioning refers to the arrangement for products to occupy a clear, special and ideal position in the minds of target consumers relative to competing products. Therefore, marketers must design their positions to differentiate their products from competing brands and gain the greatest strategic advantage in the target market.

Market positioning is the determination of the position of an enterprise and product in a target market. Market positioning was proposed by American marketers Ai Reis and Jack Trout in 1972.

The key to market positioning is that companies must try to find the characteristics of their products that have more competitive advantages than competitors. There are two basic types of competitive advantage: one is price competitive advantage, which is to set a lower price than competitors under the same conditions. This requires companies to make every effort to reduce unit costs. The second is preference for competitive advantage, which can provide certain characteristics to meet the specific preferences of customers. This requires companies to make every effort to work on product features. Therefore, the entire process of enterprise market positioning can be completed through the following three major steps:

1) Identify potential competitive advantages

The central task of this step is to answer the following three questions :

First, what is the positioning of competitors' products?

The second is how satisfied and satisfied are the customer desires in the target market?

The third is to target competitors' market positioning and the real needs of potential customers. What should companies do and can do?

To answer these three questions, corporate marketers must systematically design, search, analyze, and report on the above-mentioned issues and research results through all research methods.

By answering the above three questions, companies can grasp and determine where their potential competitive advantages lie.

2) Core competitive advantage positioning

Competitive advantage indicates the ability of a company to outperform its competitors. This capability can be either existing or potential. Choosing a competitive advantage is actually a process of comparing the strength of an enterprise and its competitors in all aspects. The comparative index should be a complete system. Only in this way can the relative competitive advantage be accurately selected. The usual method is to analyze and compare what are the strengths and weaknesses of the seven aspects of business management, technology development, procurement, production, marketing, finance and products. In this way, we will select the most suitable project for this enterprise to determine the position of the enterprise in the target market.

3) Strategy formulation

The main task of this step is for the company to accurately disseminate its unique competitive advantages to potential customers through a series of promotional promotions, and leave a deep impression on customers.

First, make the target customer understand, know, familiarize, agree with, like and favor this company's market positioning, and establish an image consistent with that positioning in the minds of customers.

Second, the company strengthens the image of the target customer through various efforts, maintains the understanding of the target customer, stabilizes the attitude of the target customer, and deepens the feelings of the target customer to consolidate the image consistent with the market.

Finally, companies should pay attention to deviations in the target customer s understanding of their market positioning or ambiguity, confusion, and misunderstanding of the target customer caused by errors in corporate market positioning propaganda, and timely correct images that are inconsistent with the market positioning. Even if a company's product is well positioned in the market, it should be repositioned in the following situations:

(1) New products launched by competitors are positioned near this company's products, occupying some markets of this company's products,

Different companies operate different products and face different customers.

Solving positioning problems can help companies solve

(A) regional positioning

Regional positioning means that when marketing strategy is adopted, an enterprise should establish a market area for the product, that is, determine whether the product will enter the international market, the national market, or a certain market or place. Only by pinpointing your own market can a company's marketing plan succeed.

(II) Hierarchical positioning

Every society contains many social strata, different strata have different consumption characteristics and consumption needs, and what stratum the enterprise's products are facing is a question that enterprises should consider when choosing a target market. According to different standards, people in society can be divided into different strata. For example, according to knowledge, there are high-education, middle-education, and low-education classes. For the purpose of class positioning, we must firmly grasp the characteristics of the needs of a certain class and meet their needs from all aspects of marketing.

(3) Career positioning

Occupation positioning refers to the person to whom an enterprise should consider selling products or services when formulating a marketing strategy. It is very obvious to sell feed to farmers and farmers, and to sell stationery to students, and the ones that can really produce marketing benefits are often those inconspicuous and difficult to detect positions. When positioning the market, you must have a pair of eyes that are good at discovering, and timely find the blind spots of competitors, so that you can obtain huge gains in the field of positioning.

(D) personality positioning

Personality positioning is to consider how to sell the company's products to those with special personality. At this time, choosing a part of people with the same personality as their positioning target and implementing marketing strategies for their hobbies can achieve the best marketing results.

(V) Age positioning

When formulating a marketing strategy, the company must also consider the age of the sales target. People of different age groups have different characteristics of their own needs. Only by fully considering these characteristics and meeting different consumer requirements can they win consumers. For baby products, the marketing strategy should be tailored to the mother, because most baby products are purchased by the mother.