It has become easier than ever to create your own product or to source them. Places like Alibaba and local wholesale markets has spawned an era of private labeled businesses for passionate and opportunistic individuals to take advantage of.
And with so many places and channels for someone to potentially see your item, product positioning has become one of the most discussed business strategies.
Not having the right positioning and strategy could mean a huge loss of time, money, and brand equity.
What is Product Positioning?
Product positioning is a form of marketing that presents the benefits of your product to a particular target audience. Through market research and focus groups, marketers can determine which audience to target based on favorable responses to the product.
Shopify
Basically, product positioning is carefully and strategically putting a product in front of a certain target audience to generate sales and revenue.
It is a form of marketing that requires a high level of research to place a product and create favourable feedback from the targeted market. It involves nailing down the visuals, feelings, and words used to market to a specific demographic.
For instance, the words and imagery of a sleek modern minimalistic watch would be entirely different when it is shown to busy fashionable women and to the businessmen in their late 20s to early 30s.
The market research for each of those target audiences found different interests that the positioning
Product Positioning vs. Product Differentiation
You’re probably wondering how is product positioning different from product differentiation?
While product positioning focuses on a niche of audiences, product differentiation focuses on the qualities of the product and comparing it to what its competitor cannot offer.
The goal of product positioning plays a huge role in building the necessary bridge between your company and the market you’re looking to target.
Let’s take a look at the 6 Types of Product Positioning you can apply to your business.
6 Types of Product Positioning
1.) Customer Benefits Focus
This is one of the most used strategies used out there. From the word itself, you are using the key beneficial qualities of your product and market it in a specific audience.
For example, your company sells adorable little plush dolls. Of course, you wouldn’t market these to the male audience. What you can do is present the qualities of your products to the female kids since they’re the ones who will most likely appreciate the product.
2.) Quality Approach
As for the quality approach, you are marketing your product while highlighting the quality of it compared to the other brands.
For example, if you were to buy a car, would you settle for a used dealership or a completely brand new model? Coming into this, you’d assume that the former is cheaper in quality than the latter.
3.) Application Marketing
For this method, you are marketing your product for a certain use. This way, you can set up a specific audience and work from there once it grows bigger.
For example, if you are to market swimwear…Naturally, you will do this in the summer since this season is where swimwears are often used.
Once you establish a market, regardless of the season, you can introduce more products that would entice your audience without compromising loyalty – a foundation you established during summer.
4.) Product Process
This is one of the most used product positionings that you may not have even noticed.
You use a model as a representation of your market and use that as a bridge to your audience.
For example, you want to market high-end tote bags. Like every luxury brands out there, you can hire celebrities or supermodels to market your products and set a standard within the community or your target audience.
5.) Product Class
A simple technique that only requires you to set your products within a certain range as an alternative.
Let’s say you are to market lip balm for example. You wouldn’t put it in the dairy section, right? What you would do is position it in the beauty section of a certain market and build your engagements from there. It’s a simple method that often works if done right.
6.) Cultural Symbols
As one of the widely used methods of product positioning, here you are setting your market within a certain culture.
You are creating an engagement without compromising the cultures of these places to show respect and build a market within them. This is also defined as using a cultural symbol to create a market engagement.
To use an existing example, nudity is one of the most prevalent symbolism in today’s music industry. Several albums from artists like Shakira, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry were all marketed globally that explicitly shows graphic covers. To respect certain cultures, the labels decided to photoshop these covers for them to market them in countries where female nudity is a major offense.
As you can see, there are a lot of things you can do if you want to position your product in a certain market.
You can choose to focus on one strategy or make a hybrid of two or three of these to make a super marketing plan for your products.
Of course, do not forget to conduct research to as this will be a vital component before the execution.
[box type=”download”] Are part of our Facebook Group? Join the Branding & Marketing Tribe for Ecom Entrepreneurs here![/box]
