Positioning

A marketing term, positioning is the act of memorably and positively anchoring a product, service, idea, individual, or experience in the minds of customers (including prospective customers). A product that is well positioned is widely perceived by the target audience as possessing distinctive, unique, and appealing features. As a result, it is not easily confused with other products, even those that occupy a similar category. Effective positioning, therefore, is critical to a products success, because this marketing tool helps a product stand out from competitors' offerings.

While the concept of product positioning has a long history, rooted in the packaged goods industry, the perceived importance of positioning, along with a broadened understanding of the term, gained notable ground in the late 1960s and early 1970s largely because of the work of advertising executives Al Ries and Jack Trout. Ries and Trout claimed that in the modern age of heightened marketing noise and prolific advertising messages assaulting people s senses, it was more crucial than ever for a firm to pay attention to developing a solid positioning strategy for its product, one that would cut through the clutter. They also contended that anything could be positioned—not just products, for instance, but also individuals and ideas.

In 1972, in the influential trade magazine Advertising Age, Ries and Trout proclaimed that the “Positioning Era” had arrived, and they coauthored a series of articles exploring that topic. These articles eventually became the basis of their bestselling book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. A critical, and controversial, tenet of their book was that positioning was not so much what a marketer does with a product, but what a marketer does to the mind of the prospect. In other words, the process of effective positioning requires marketers to get inside people's heads to understand which messages, or combination of messages, are most likely to resonate and break through the barrage of competing messages. While Ries and Trout were firm advocates of positioning and encouraged its practice, positioning, seen in this light, could be negatively perceived as a form of mind manipulation. Adroit marketers who understood how to tap into consumer psychology purportedly might be able to entice people to buy an item not necessarily because it was truly the best product but because it was packaged, promoted, and positioned in such a way as to trigger a purchase decision that was more emotional than rational. Effective positioning and ethical positioning are not, therefore, necessarily always synonymous.

In their quest to garner consumers' attention to their products, marketers often use a variety of positioning tactics and tools, such as perceptual positioning maps. The purpose of positioning maps is to illustrate how consumers perceive a certain product with regard to specific buying criteria (like price and performance) in relation to how they perceive competitors' products on those same criteria. As Philip Kotier and Gary Armstrong have explained, marketers often use positioning maps to help them design a strong positioning strategy that emphasizes the points of distinction that consumers will find most important.

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