Positioning

The positioning, in marketing, is a business strategy that aims to ensure that a product occupies a distinctive place, relative to the competition, in the mind of the consumer. The concept of "product" is understood broadly: it can be a physical or intangible element, company, place, political party, religious belief, person, etc. In this way, what happens in the market in relation to the product is a consequence of what happens in the subjectivity of each individual in the process of knowledge, consideration and use of the offer. Hence, positioning today is closely linked to the guiding concept of the value proposition, which considers the comprehensive design of the offer, in order to make demand sustainable over longer time horizons.

The "repositioning" It consists of changing the position that the product or service has in the customer's mind, or sometimes remembering one that they had already forgotten.

On the other hand, the word has a different meaning in online marketing and refers to positioning a web page in the search engine of a default browser.

Positioning strategies

The ability to identify a positioning opportunity is a good test of the skills of a marketing expert. Successful positioning strategies translate into the acquisition by a product of a competitive advantage. The most common bases for building a product positioning strategy are:

• Positioning on specific solutions, benefits or needs.
• Positioning on the specific use of categories.
• Positioning on use occasions.
• Positioning through dissociation by type of product.

But always with a competitive approach. The key is that it is an "against" strategy. More generally, there are three types of positioning concepts:

1. Functional positions:
   • Solve problems.
   • Providing benefits to consumers.
2. Symbolic positions:
   • Increase of the image itself.
   • Ego identification.
   • Social ownership and significance.
   • Affective bonding.
3. Experiential positions:
   • Provide sensory stimulation.
   • Provide cognitive stimulation.

The ultimate goal is to achieve a positive emotion, related to the "product", which causes favorable behavior to accept what is proposed (purchase, vote, etc.)

Finding a position is facilitated by a graphical technique called perceptual mapping, various research techniques, and statistical techniques such as multidimensional scaling, factor analysis, conjoint analysis, and logical analysis.

Generally, the product positioning process includes:

1. Identify competing products.
2. Identify the attributes (also called dimensions) that define the 'space' of the product.
3. Collect information from a sample of consumers about their perceptions of the relevant attributes of each product and each competitor.
4. Determine the share of each product that occupies the mind of consumers.
5. Determine the current location of each product in the product space.
6. Determine the favorite combinations of attributes of those who constitute objective markets (respect to an ideal vector).
7. Examine the concordance between the positions of competing products, the position of the own product and the position of an ideal vector.
8. Select the optimal position to compete.

History

The term positioning was coined in 1969 by Jack Trout, who wrote: "Positioning is the game people play in today's imitation market (or me-too)" In 1982, with his partner at the time, Al Ries, he presented his book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, which It has then been translated into 19 languages and has become a fundamental benchmark for competitive strategy.

Messages prepared in the old and traditional way give no hope of making their way in the modern over-communicated society.

In order to understand how we got to where we are today, it is worth going back briefly to the history of communication:

• The era of the products.
• The era of the image
• The Age of Positioning