De-Positioning

Positioning a product or service in a market and differentiating it from the competition are strategies widely viewed as ethical and professional, as long as assertions made in the campaign are accurate, complete, and fair. The same cannot be said for a different practice: de-positioning, which seems to mean undermining a competitor's product or service using any means available.

De-positioning, in the view of some proponents, means attacking a competitor's new idea, product, or service the moment it surfaces. The attack begins even before all the facts are available. It means rushing to get your own new idea, product, or service out even if it isn't fully developed. It means generating sufficient chaos and confusion to discredit a competitor's new product, idea, or service or to spoil its launch.

There are many problems with de-positioning, not the least of which is the damage a de-positioning campaign can do to your own industry. If you attack product X unmercifully, consumers might start to wonder about product Y and product Z, and they [Page 257]might eventually get around to wondering about your product. An attack against a competitor can actually be an attack against yourself if the campaign has an unanticipated and negative impact on your product or service.

De-positioning also lowers the ethical and moral tone of society generally and of business, fundraising, and other practices specifically. This hurts any organization that is trying to get a fair hearing from the public for a product or service and makes it hard for honest businesses and nonprofit organizations to establish and to maintain high credibility with their publics.

An organization that tries to de-position the competition uses questionable techniques that, when publicized, will harm the organization's prospects. It can take years and a good deal of hard work to polish a tarnished image. When those de-positioning activities are exposed, as they surely will be, they will be described as unethical.

Consumers are poorly served by de-positioning activities. If company X really does have a super new product but cannot get it accepted because of the confusion created by company Y's de-positioning efforts, consumers will be the primary losers. Worse, consumers might buy company Y's bad product (rushed off the assembly line before it was ready just to de-position company X's product), rather than company X's superior product. All of this is good for company Y in the near term, but it is bad for everyone else, and it will be bad for company Y in the long term.