Brand Positioning - 2.pptx

International Brand Management - 2

Brand Positioning
Brand positioning describes how a brand is
different from its competitors and where, or
how, it sits in customers’ minds. Positioning is
what you do to the mind of the customer. The
position of a brand is the perception it brings
about in the mind of a target customer. A
brand positioning strategy therefore involves
creating brand associations in customers’
minds to make them perceive the brand in a
specific way
Importance of Brand Positioning: By shaping
consumer preferences, brand positioning
strategies are directly linked to consumer
loyalty, consumer-based brand equity and the
willingness to purchase the brand. Effective
brand positioning can be referred as the
extent to which a brand is perceived as
favourable, different and credible in
consumers’ minds Source: Secondary Sources on Google

Brand Positioning
How to find a Powerful Brand Positioning
• In order to create a unique and successful positioning for your brand, you need to analyse the
following
 Understand what your consumers want
 Understand what your company’s and brand capabilities are
 Understand how each competitor is positioning their brand
• Once you’ve done that, you will need choose a positioning statement that:
 Will resonate with your consumers
 Can be delivered by your company (capabilities)
 That is different from your competitors
• The remaining challenge is to then reflect this brand positioning in everything that you do
(brand personality, packaging design, product, service, visual identity design,
communications, etc)
Source: Secondary Sources on Google

Brand Positioning
Perceptual Map
A perceptual map is a visual representation of the perceptions of customers or potential
customers about specific attributes of an organization, brand, product, service, or idea. This
diagrammatic technique (perceptual mapping) asks participants to place products relative to
one another along 2 or more axis. The resulting map shows how consumers see the strengths of
competing products in a particular market.
Perceptual maps are also referred to as position maps and market maps. Examples include:
• Quality vs Price
• Functionality vs Price
• Healthiness vs Tastiness
• Price vs Performance
• Price vs Safety & Reliability

Brand Positioning
Perceptual Map
A perceptual map is a visual representation of the perceptions of customers or potential
customers about specific attributes of an organization, brand, product, service, or idea. This
diagrammatic technique (perceptual mapping) asks participants to place products relative to
one another along 2 or more axis. The resulting map shows how consumers see the strengths of
competing products in a particular market.
Perceptual maps are also referred to as position maps and market maps. Examples include:
• Quality vs Price
• Functionality vs Price
• Healthiness vs Tastiness
• Price vs Performance
• Price vs Safety & Reliability
Perceptual mapping helps the marketer to make brand positioning strategies. These maps are
the most important piece of information when the brand thinks of positioning itself within a
certain market segment

Brand Positioning

Brand Positioning
Some Important Rules of Brand Positioning:
• Be the first
 Being the first to bring a new product to the market is the best positioning possible. In
many cases the most famous brands were not the first to necessarily introduce the
product, but the first to establish it in the mind of the consumer
 In the case of computers IBM was not the first and only company to make computers, but
they were able to take the position in the brain of consumers as the computer company. If
you cannot be the first in one field, make a small modification, so that you are first in the
modified field
 For example, people remember the first person to fly the Atlantic on their own, they don’t
remember the second, but they know the third, because she was the first woman to fly a
plane across the Atlantic

Brand Positioning
• Be second
 If you cannot be the first, the second position is also lucrative, but any position below
second is not worth the fight
 In many positions, you will find two brands on the top, one dominant and one competing.
The classic example is Coca –cola and Pepsi
 Another example is Hertz and Avis – the two leaders of rental cars in the USA. For years
Avis was trying to get the first positioning. Then they accepted their second place and
even celebrated it in their marketing campaign. The slogan of the campaign was saying:
When you are not the biggest in rent a car, you have to try harder. We do. We are only No.
2. This campaign was a huge success for Avis and help them take a great share of the
market
• Pick a Good Name
 There are good names to call a business and there are extremely unsuitable ones. If you
are first, pretty much anything goes. However, nowadays competition in most sectors is so
much higher, that a brand cannot afford a mediocre name

Brand Positioning
• Avoid Extension Line Trap
 A brand extension leverages the reputation, popularity, and brand loyalty associated with
a well-known product to launch a new product. To be successful, there must be a logical
association between the original product and the new item
 A weak or non existent association can result in the opposite effect, brand dilution
 Apple (AAPL) is an example of a company that has a history of effectively using a brand
extension strategy to propel growth. Starting with its popular Mac computers, the
company has leveraged its brand to sell products in new categories, as can be seen with
the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone.
 An example of an unsuccessful brand extension occurred in the early 1980s when popular
jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss & Co. decided to launch a line of men's three-piece suits
under the sub-brand Levi's Tailored Classics. After years of poor sales, the company
discontinued the line. The company couldn't overcome consumers' perception of the
brand as one associated with rugged casual wear and not business attire. However, Levi's
learned from its mistake and in 1986 introduced Levi's Dockers, a line of casual khaki
pants and other men's apparel that has since been a consistent top seller for the company

Brand Positioning
• It should be Unique
 The goal is to create a unique impression in the customer’s mind so that the customer
associates something specific and desirable with your brand that is distinct from rest of
the marketplace

Brand Positioning Strategies
• Value-based Brand positioning
 Value-based brand positioning strategy positions the brand based on the value the
customers get on buying or consuming the brand’s offerings. In simple terms, this type of
brand positioning is chosen to position the brand based on its value proposition
 This value often relates to the customer-centric tangible benefits like getting the work
done, making things easier, etc

• Features-Based Positioning
 When the competition is huge and the products are similar, companies usually position
their products by focusing more on product-specific features
 This type of positioning strategy is also called USP-focused positioning and is often seen in
the mobile industry

• Problem and Solution Based Positioning
 Many brands present themselves as a solution provider to the problems of the customers.
The ideology behind such positioning is to demonstrate that this particular brand can help
you solve your problems instantly and efficiently. Banks, Insurances, and loans have
started themselves to a position as a solution provider.
 Often advertised as ‘Need a loan? Contact us and we will get the loan Approved within
Minutes or Seconds with minimum documentation’ is the claim which is followed by many
banks thereby acting as a solution provider to the financial problems of the customer.

• Lifestyle Positioning
 By positioning itself as a lifestyle brand, a brand tries to sell an image and identity rather
than the product. The main focus is to associate the brand with a lifestyle and focus is
more on the aspirational value than the product value. Cigarette, Alcohol, and Tobacco
companies are often seen to use lifestyle positioning while marketing their products

• Parent Brand Driven Positioning
 This positioning strategy aims at establishing a brand promise and a reputation of the
parent brand. All the products and sub-brands under the parent brand seem to comply
with the established promise

• Experience-Based Positioning
 Experience-based positioning refers to positioning the offering based on the experience
the customer gets while buying or consuming it
 The main focus is on to developing a unique experience for the customer which
differentiates the offering from the competition
 Restaurants, hotels, and other service-based operators use this type of brand positioning
strategy

• Competitor based positioning
 Since the competition has increased companies are taking this strategy to demonstrate
the superiority amongst all other available competitors in the market. Right from
insurance companies to mobile phones every company establishes its supremacy by
comparing their products or services to other companies or direct competitors
 In 2018, Google launched Pixel 3 with a premium feature called Night Sight. To promote
that feature during the launch event of the phone the company experts compared of
pictures clicked by phone then directly and side by side with a picture clicked by Google
pixel 3 with night sight. This would be an example of direct competitor-based positioning

• Price Based Positioning
 As much as quality plays an important role in the product success price is an equally
important factor which determines the enormity of success of a particular brand. Why is
there are expensive brand positioning themselves as unique and niche, the appeal to a
very limited segment of customers who can afford to purchase them? There still remains a
major bulk order chunk of customers who are not able to purchase those nice products or
services. It is to appeal to these customers that price positioning is done by many Brands.
One such example of price positioning is Air Asia, which is the South Asian airline service,
whose operations are based in Malaysia
 The airline has successfully positioned itself as an economic service appealing to the
middle class and lower middle class and making foreign tours possible for them. While
they may compromise on the quality sometimes, the fact still remains that they are seen
as the first choice by every first-time flight travellers who cannot afford to travel by a
luxury brand like American airlines

How To Create A Strong Brand Positioning Strategy?
Before you decide your brand positioning, ask yourself these three questions.
 What does my customer want?
 Can I promise him to deliver it better and/or differently than my competitors?
 Why will they buy my promise?
• What Does My Customer Want?
 Not everyone in the market is your customer. You need to divide the market into ‘my
customer’ and ‘not my customer’. This way, it’ll be easier for you to know what exactly is
your customers’ wants are. The division should be followed by you trying to be in your
customers’ shoes. A good businessman speaks in the voice of the consumer. Your research
should not be based on secondary data. You should go out and look for what the
customer actually wants, make the product fit those wants, and they’ll buy it
• Be Better And/Or Different
 If it’s not just you who is in the market, you’ve got to find a way to deliver your promise
better and/or differently than your competitors. Make a brand which has a recall, which
comes to the customer’s minds when they hear about the particular product category or
the feature you’re offering

• Give Them A Reason To Buy Your Promise
 Your promise should be one of the factors they consider while buying the product. Use
this trick
 Decide your product
 List its various characteristics
 Do research, and
 Divide the characteristics into essential and add-ons.
 Select only those categories, be it essential or add-ons, which customers consider while
making a purchase. (E.g. aesthetics, fragrance, taste, shape, cost, etc.)
 Find out what among these categories can you provide better than the competitors.
 Whatever you decide, don’t lose your focus from the essential characteristics. (E.g. Taste
will always be most important characteristic which a customer consider while buying a
food product)
 Provide your unique feature along with the essential characteristics.

Few More Examples of Brand Positioning
Nike promotes a athletic lifestyle for everyone irrespective of
their body type
Disneyland boasts itself as ‘The Happiest Place On Earth’. The
amusement park has positioned itself as an experience of a
lifetime which isn’t provided by anyone else in the world.

Positioning Errors
• Under Positioning:
The state of buyers where they do not have much information about the brand and its
attributes and use and consider the brand to be just another in the pool of brand is called
under positioning.
Example: When Pepsi introduced its clear Crystal Pepsi in 1993, customers were distinctly
unimpressed. They didn't see "clarity" as an important benefit in a soft drink.
• Over Positioning:
This is the state where the buyers or perspective buyers attaches a very narrow image for the
brand. They have perception about a particular brand due to lack of information or pre
decided notion. For example, a consumer might think that diamond rings at Tiffany (an
American luxury jewellery and specialty retailer) start at $5,000 when in fact Tiffany now
offers affordable diamond rings starting at $1,000.

Positioning Errors
• Confused Positioning
It is often observed that a brand will created too many associations with the product or will
reposition the brand very frequently. This results in confusing the potential buyers about the
goods and hampers the positioning schemes.
For Example: This was the case with Stephen Jobs’ sleek and powerful NeXT desktop
computer, which was positioned first for students, then for engineers, and then for
businesspeople, all unsuccessfully.
• Doubtful Positioning
There are situations where the buyer finds it extremely difficult to believe the claims made
by the brand given the price, product features or the manufacturer. This means the
positioning strategy has not been effective in convincing the potential buyers about the good.
For Example: When GM's Cadillac division (a division that designs and builds luxury vehicles)
introduced the Cimarron, it positioned the car as a luxury competitor with BMW, Mercedes,
and Audi. Although the car featured leather seats, a luggage rack, lots of chrome, and a
Cadillac logo stamped on the chassis, customers saw it as a dolled-up version of Chevy's
Cavalier and Oldsmobile's Firenza. The car was positioned as "more for more": customers
saw it as "less for more."

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