Amelia's Marvelous Marketing Blog

I have never really thought about what positioning means– I hear the word thrown around in business conversations and blogs, lectures and adverts, but I just always assumed it meant the actual physical position of a product. Lightbulb moment of note when Tamar explained its actual meaning in class this week- positioning is not a physical concept but rather something far more important and esoteric. Positioning refers to the real estate that a product occupies in a consumers mind relative to the position of all the competitors’ products.

Positioning is at the very heart of marketing because if you do not know what position you occupy in a consumer’s mind then your advertising strategy might be completely off target. Positioning determines what type of strategy the company pursues.

The first authors to clearly define and discuss the subject were Al Ries and Jack Trout in the book Battle for Your Mind.

In the beginning, positioning was more about cutting through the ambient “noise” of modern society’s overload of brands. It is now more focussed on a brand’s position in relation to competitors products. In the classic example of Avis claiming “No.2, We Try Harder”, the point was to be open about the fact that they occupied the second position in the market and to actually embrace this position and use it as a means to get through to their customers.

Positioning differs from re-positioning, as re-postioning involves changing the identity of a product, relative to the identity of competing products.  De-positioning, on the other hand, involves changing the identity of competing products, relative to the identity of your own product.