Are you "positioned" for the win? – PART I
An effective way to product’s success is by factoring in & targeting expectations of the markets & here’s why using some really strong positioning strategies could be seminal
Preface
Here’s a 2-part series that focuses on positioning an organization for the WIN.
So, this is how it’s going to be divided:
PART I – Market perception, 5 Ps theory, positioning types & their importance
PART II – Approaches to positioning, Positioning Tree Framework, Case Study
PART I:
Market Perception Matters
Consider this!
Roll back to the 2010 when Instagram was launched. It was meant to be a photo sharing app and was launched exclusively for iOS and iPhone users enjoyed that exclusivity for quite some time which is also believed to have largely added to the whole aura of Apple phones released during that time.
Was that really a novel idea?
Didn’t anyone else think of building a photo sharing App anytime prior to that?
Now, roll back further down memory lane…
How many of you remember Picasa?
It was Google’s pet - a picture sharing tool that was launched in 2002, much earlier to Instagram. And, it did take off pretty well, it may not be altogether wrong to quote that it may have rode on Google’s popularity itself back then – “Oh! There’s another application from THE greatest company of the current internet era”. A few other worthy mentions over great feature additions to the App would be the Face Recognition (2006) and Geo Tagging (2007).
In spite of all those features already present over similar Apps, there came Instagram with adoption numbers storming through.
Here are some stats:
The launch campaign and strategy were pretty simple & straight forward.
“To enable communication through images”
Given the advent of other social channels gaining popularity raking in those numbers over their DAU, WAU, MAU exhibiting some amazing stickiness, it made total sense to brand it that way.
Deciphering the messaging used by the marketing, it may have been something on the lines of:
“Hello there! We are a new-age photo sharing app alright, which means yes, you can share photos seamlessly and open up your lives to the world in general & your target audience in particular, but you can also have some lovely conversations around it & build some amazing memories whilst creating some unforgettable experiences as well”
That right there is an example of Market Positioning.
When the perception of most of the world tends to gravitate unilaterally towards “market positioning” as they come across the phrase “positioning”, it does indeed span multiple other areas as well and factoring all of them in over that product / feature build ought to be imperative for any product team & their all-round success.
Market Positioning and its importance
“When positioning is largely perceived to be influencing and affecting external entities like the markets, it’s very important that each of the internal teams understand the importance of great positioning as it could end up affecting the quantum of overall effort that’d be needed to pull off some magnificent feats”
Definition:
Market positioning is considered as a strategic exercise that would be used to establish the image of a given brand or a product over the users of the markets one is looking to target, which ought to factor in all the crucial touchpoints that would influence that decision leading to adoption.
“It’s considered easy to build products / features but never easy to get the message across to the target markets and help them adopt via getting them to identify the benefits / value proposition”.
One essentially talks of the 4 Ps (Product, Placement, Price, Promotion) referring to marketing in general and there is an effective & a standardized way those elements are supposed to be defined covering a few prominent details of how it would fit in to the so called “product ecosystem” which is the list of products / tools the users currently accustomed to and using.
Extending it further the introduction of the 5th P which is the Perception of the users ought to change towards helping them correlate and do what it takes to adopt that product seamlessly into their lives, which is largely down to influencing them using the right set of incentives.
And talking of market positioning it encompasses the whole and soul of whatever discussed up until now. One ought to be able to effectively employ these 5Ps combining it with an acute understanding of the user’s behavior, pain points and motivations – of course, the answer to which lies in descriptive & immersed research.
Types of positioning strategies
Given a product and its targeted market or customer segments, there just is no bar to how your marketing team’s efforts and the brand of messaging employed are getting translated into market perception which could in theory also be a motivation behind teams taking to those A/B tests and consistently trying to refine everything about the pitch right from the central concept, the hook, the messaging, the pivot.
Also, not to mention the dissonance it could get orgs & teams into over adhering blindly to a certain positioning strategy and not really bothering about the perception bit over measuring how it is all received by the intended group(s) of people.
If you want to read more about organization dissonance, here’s some resource that could be handy:
Having said that, it’s good to know the other types of positioning that are used significantly and how they seem to connect back with market positioning. Depending on “the need” that’s felt on the filed given the launch of a product it is very possible that organizations and teams may switch to some specific type of positioning, some of which are shown here in the visual below.
When all these types of positioning listed out here could still be thought of as an integral part of market positioning, it’s typically the specificity in the focus that sets them apart as each of them chiefly targets a specific dimension like price point, or a brand or a comparison to competition or a product as a whole.
Let’s try and understand each of these with suitable examples:
1. Product positioning
Product positioning predominantly entails focusing solely on and fronting the users of the intended market with the value proposition of a product. This could be typical of organizations practicing PLG (product-led-growth) strategy. It’d talk about why the users ought to adopt and exactly how their lives may improve once they do.
For ex: TikTok talks of inspiring creativity and spreading joy beyond boundaries
2. Brand positioning
Brand positioning although an exercise not exclusively undertaken during the promotions or product launches, the focus is not the granularity (a given product’s release) but highly generic in trying to form and project the image of the organization by specifically highlighting the beliefs they carry.
For ex: Coca-Cola quenches your thirst and is simply so refreshing
3. Price positioning
Using price or the pricing strategy to carve a niche into a market segment that’s often pretty mature and spoilt for choice, it refers to the manner in which everything seems to just be about the PRICE and nothing else.
For ex: Store-wide discount sale – “pick anything for $1”
4. Competitor-based positioning
Pitting products against an (x) competitor or even a series of them perhaps and throwing open those well-devised and elaborate comparison charts with those ✅ &❌marks that strip it down to a level of granularity covering each of the features / parameters so as to prove the efficiency of the product is what competitor-based positioning strategy is all about.
For ex: Feature-list - comparison of cars from the other competitors operating in the same bracket / customer segment
Remember:
Positioning is an imperative exercise as it directly concerns with how products are being perceived by the users you are looking to target, sans which one can’t expect those growth numbers to move even by an inch, forget about them taking off into orbit over a blinding adoption trajectory, although having said that the strategies and approaches ought to largely vary, influenced by external factors.