|
MARKETING POSITIONING ANALYSIS
Marketing positioning is establishing the most powerful branding for your business. This process must account for what the market wants, what you have to offer, and how your competitors are perceived. BRAND IMAGE No matter how great your product or service, regardless of how significant a benefit the features offered to the user, if your brand positioning or image is on the nose customers won’t buy it. The persona you project to the market must be compelling to customers. It must suggest that, for them, you are the supplier of choice. Our job is identifying what persona or image you should be projecting. To do that we need to understand precisely what it is your customers are looking for – what are their needs, wants and also their dislikes. Furthermore we must also understand how they view your competitors. Then when we have identified some generic types of customers, we can examine which of these you should be selling to. POSITIONING ANALYSIS Developing Customer Insights The first step is to research your market to ascertain the drivers for customers. Essentially we are trying to establish who the customers in the market are and what they want. We obtain relevant information about them - for business markets this might be location, industry, revenue size, employee numbers, history, and operating systems. For consumer markets age, gender, occupation, income and location. Information we gather will also extend to insights into customers’ perceptions, preferences, and behaviors. This entails assessing their impressions of brands in the market including yours and your competitors, how they rank these brands, previous buying patterns and purchasing intentions. This information will be derived from such sources as your CRM system, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, industry bodies and our own research studies if neccessary. Segmentation Once we have an understanding of the customer market we can begin to identify generic groups of customers who share particular characteristics. This assists with determining the potential for you within each group, and helps to inform the design of marketing strategies for each customer type. This is referred to as segmentation. Targeting The next stage in the process is establishing which groups or segments of customers the business should be pursuing. Which segments are of sufficient size, can be communicated with, and are accessible to your sales channels? Given the forecast revenues, marketing and delivery costs, which customer segments represent the most lucrative opportunities for your business? Positioning Having established who you should be attempting to win over and why, we are now in a position to identify a brand identity which will be most appealing to them. We can articulate the brand attributes which will be most appealing to your customer targets, when compared against your competitors. Optimal firm, brand, or product positioning is ultimately distilled down to a specific set of characteristics or attributes appropriate for the product category and most compelling for your market. This list of attributes will typically consist of between eight to twelve defining and distinctive characteristics which can be clearly articulated. This brand identity will guide the development of all marketing strategy and the marketing collateral and activities which result. Marketing strategy
|
