How to identify the best positioning for your product or service?

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The Marketing Plan

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IE Business School

The Marketing Plan

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Cours 4 sur 5 dans Specialization Marketing Strategy

Create your own Marketing Plan for your own product or service idea. In this course you will learn how to produce arguably the most important marketing tool for any business. Rather than simply learning the stages of The Marketing Plan, you will be asked each week to complete a peer graded assignment which will help you complete a simplified version of the plan. You will be required either to map the four crucial stages for your own product or service idea or use the Nissan Leaf case study (attached in the additional readings) in order to produce a professional example. Ramon Diaz Bernardo - a professor with over 20 years experience - will guide you through the four most important stages of The Marketing Plan: analysis, marketing strategy; the marketing mix and expected results. On this journey, he will conduct interviews with leading experts from international companies in marketing as well as invite students to join him for explanations and discussions. This excellent and unique course allows you not only to learn the essential parts of The Marketing Plan but also map out the future of your own business and take the first steps on the path to launching your own product.

À partir de la leçon

Marketing Strategy

Welcome to the marketing strategy part of the course. Here, you will learn how to identify the best target segment for your brand, product or service and also how to position your company in order to best reach them. You will also begin to understand the benefits and drawbacks of trying to attract new customers or retain existing ones.

Introduction to marketing strategy.2:59

What is marketing strategy?5:22

Marketing strategy definition.10:15

Financial and non-financial objectives.4:36

The customer attraction vs customer retention dilemma.7:41

Identifying the best target segment for your product or service.9:23

How to identify the best positioning for your product or service?9:34

How to complete assignment 2: marketing strategy.4:50

Rencontrer les enseignants

Ramon Diaz-Bernardo
Associate Professor
Marketing

[MUSIC]

Hi, we're getting now to the last stage of the marketing strategy definition.

So we've been in this journey from defining objectives to defining the target

segment, and now we're going to get into defining the position.

So if you see in this slide, you can see that the first aim of the marketing

strategy was defining the objective,

get financial objectives, non-financial objectives many time, and

objectives in terms of customer attraction versus customer retention.

Once we have this clear, we move into the target segment definition.

The group of customers that could be more willing to buy my brand and

the group of customers who I'm going to focus my marketing resources.

And now, we're going to try and define the positioning.

The positioning is usually the last step, okay?

But once again, it's going to be very influential in the marketing mix,

which is going to come later.

That's why many times we also say that targeting and positioning are the real two

strategic things that you need to define in your marketing plan.

And the rest is implementation, okay.

So if you see here in this slide we have basically

strategic objectives that we are defining here, target, segment, and positioning.

Let me remind you that we're using these very simple sequence that we called STP,

segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

So we already identify segments.

You already identify what segment's going to be your target segment.

And remember this is something that you're going to do also in your assessment.

And then we're going to define what could be the best positioning.

But as you see in the sequence before defining positioning we have

already defined target segment.

So whatever we decide in terms of positioning

should be well aligned with the target segment that we have already defined.

Okay, so we need to be consistent and coherent in the targeting and

the positioning.

So what is positioning?

Let me tell you a very brief positioning definition.

Positioning is designing the company's offering and image so that they occupy

a meaningful and distinctive competitive position in the target consumer mind.

So basically what is this?

Well it's the idea that we want to associate with a brand, okay.

If I tell you Volvo, the car maker, probably most of you

would associate this with one idea which is in safety or security.

Why? Well because Volvo has been investing in

that idea forever.

Okay, so now we are assume that Volvo is safety.

So the positioning of Volvo is safety, they own that position.

Does this means that in real terms they have the safest cars?

Probably yes, not sure.

But of the perception, my perception, or

pretty much everybody else's perception is that they have, so that's their position.

Okay, so think about different brands that you use, that you like, or

that you don't like, and try and think of the positioning.

It's an interesting exercise to try and see if their

marketing strategies are being successful in delivering a clear idea and

a clear positioning for the brand or no.

Okay, when the idea is not clear, it's confusing, the positioning is not good.

The positioning should be simple and well associated with the brand.

So how do we build the positioning?

How are you guys going to build your positioning in your marketing plan?

First thing is identifying elements of differentiation.

If you remember from the analysis stage of the marketing plan that we discussed on

week one, first thing that we do is try and

identify what are the elements of differentiation of the brand.

What is different?

What is special?

What is unique about this brand, okay?

So try to make a list of possible elements of differentiation for your brand, okay.

And then you're going to choose maybe one, maybe two,

maybe three of them as your elements of differentiation, as your positioning.

When trying to identify elements of differentiation to build your positioning,

I always remember to take the perspective of the customer.

And especially when discussing the positioning,

take the perspective of the target customer that you're pursuing.

In the in an example very simple a hotel where you have corporate travelers and

leisure travelers, if your target segment is the corporate traveler,

probably talking about the swimming pool will not be so relevant for

them as it is for the leisure traveler.

So depending on who is your target segment, you should define

some elements of differentiation as part of your positioning or no, okay?

Let me take you to another example that we've been discussing from the beginning,

which is the Nissan Leaf case.

As you can see on the screen,

there are some elements of differentiation that we're going to consider here.

Green, economical, convenient, easy to use,

performance, reliable, look, warranty, savings,

all these things are somehow elements of differentiation of the Nissan Leaf brand.

So now is the moment where you have to choose one, two, maybe three of them as

your main positioning for your brand, for your marketing plan.

What could be the criteria?

So once again let's try and build criteria to make this decision rational and

also to justify the positioning that we're going to propose in our marketing plan.

Once again I would ask you to think in terms of positioning criteria.

As you can see here in this screen, our positioning is good if it's important,

if it's distinctive, if it's superior, if it's communicable,

and if it's not easily copied by the competitor.

These five criteria are going to help you identify the best positioning for

your brand.

So once again you should compare your different possible elements of

differentiation against these criteria and try and choose the one that

comes with the best analysis after applying the positioning criteria.

We can use here a positioning matrix like the one I have here where you have in

columns important, distinctive, superior, communicable, not easily copied.

And then you have the list of possible elements of differentiation

that I'm calling positioning 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

We assign scores here, and then we choose the one that scores highest.

As I was saying, this is basically a way to justify the positioning that you're

defining for your brand.

And with these we have a target segment, and we have our positioning.

So we're ready to move to the next stage.

It is going to be defining the marketing mix.

In the assessment that we're going to do later,

you will be asked to do yourself your own target segment and positioning analysis.

And justify why these segments should be your target segment or

these element of differentiation should be your own element of differentiation.

One final thought about the positioning is,

how many elements should we include in the positioning of your brand?

Should we use only one thing like Volvo safety?

Or can we go for two things, okay, or three, or even four?

So what should be the criteria again to decide the number of elements of

differentiation to include in your positioning?

If you think about this carefully and just with common sense,

you're probably going to conclude that the more complicated the buying process,

the more features you can include in the positioning of the brand.

The most simple and intuitive and irrational it is the buying process,

the less features we should add to the positioning.

In simple terms, if you are dealing with a product that is very simple,

that is that is very much a consumer product,

probably you should all go for one simple thing, one idea.

While if you get into a more complicated, for example industrial buying, B to B,

or business to business elements, in that case you probably can deal with two,

three, or even four elements of differentiation.

When you use only one,

this is what usually is called in marketing your unique selling proposition.

Remember that and use it especially if your product or

service is in the consumer side of the industry.

And with this, we finish the STP process.

So, we finish the analysis process of the segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

And also we finish the marketing and strategy definition, that was basically

defining objectives, defining target segment, and defining the position.

Thank you.

[MUSIC].

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