In a globalized and increasingly competitive market, it's essential to take an interest in your marketing positioning, to determine and improve it. To know how your company is positioned, you need a thorough understanding of your market, the strengths of your product, the expectations of your target customers and the offerings of your competitors.
What is marketing positioning and what are its objectives?
Marketing positioning allows you to verify your company's position in its field of activity in relation to the competition.
This position is closely linked to two factors:
- how your product is perceived by consumers;
- how they perceive an identical or similar product sold by competitors.
Determining your marketing positioning is therefore an excellent way of ensuring that your offer is perfectly suited to your target audience, and that your company is thus able not only to retain, but also to win, a large share of the market. But it's also a way of alerting you if your positioning isn't performing well enough, and it's time to rectify the situation by adopting new, more appropriate strategies.
How do you determine your current marketing positioning?
Research your market
You need to gather as much information as possible about the market you want to conquer or develop, to make sure it's large enough for your company to take its place or increase its market share. This is the time to take stock of other similar or related products already on offer.
Refine your product knowledge
No doubt you're familiar with the product you're marketing, but perhaps you haven't yet taken the time to list all its advantages and disadvantages.
Take an interest in your target customers
It's all about finding out who your potential customers are, how your product can solve their problems or fulfill their desires, and what their behavior is like.
You should therefore be interested in :
- their age, gender and socio-professional category
- their lifestyle
- their budget
- their purchasing motivation (product quality, efficiency, price, availability...)
- how they behave in the presence of your product (is it a "coup de coeur" or is it something to think about?)
Conduct a competitive analysis
Unless you're proposing a totally innovative product, it's highly likely that you'll have to deal with well-established competition. It's therefore essential to identify companies working in your field whose product range is similar or very similar to the one you're marketing. To do this, take the time to conduct a competitive watch. This will enable you to observe and study what your direct and indirect competitors are doing.
This competitive analysis will enable you to optimize your performance on a number of strategic points (price, product availability, packaging, distribution channels, etc.).
Create your positioning map
You now know what your customers are looking for, and what your competitors are doing. All this data will enable you to improve your marketing positioning, if it's not at its best.
To draw up a positioning map, you need to determine the two most important criteria for positioning yourself among the competition. Which ones you choose depends essentially on the type of product you market, but some of the most common are :
- quality
- the price
- the full range
- origin
- communication strategy
- distribution strategy...
You will then need to construct a matrix made up of two axes, using the two criteria that seem most relevant to you.
Thanks to your competitive intelligence, you've gathered a certain amount of information about your competitors' results and their strengths (quality, price, origin, delivery times, marketing strategies...). You are now in a position to position your company and your main competitors on this competitive mapping.
This gives you an immediate view of where you stand, and valuable pointers to where you need to improve to strengthen your marketing position.
Good to know: it is sometimes necessary to build several positioning maps, depending on the complexity of the product you are marketing. You can position yourself on price and product origin, but also on delivery time and after-sales service, or on distribution channels and advertising... You'll then need to summarize all these elements to identify the ones you need to work on.
How do you rectify a marketing position?
To achieve a better marketing positioning, based on the information gathered through your competitive mapping, you will need to amplify the strengths of your offer and eliminate its weaknesses, which may be, for example :
- insufficient adaptation to the needs of your target customers
- a pricing policy ill-adapted to the competition
- insufficient distribution channels