What is Business Positioning?
November 16th, 2010 | 
Author: Business positioning is a difficult term to grasp, and some people consider it to be nothing more than another one of those marketing buzz-words (vague terms used extensively in the market with no clear meaning). According to the conventional definition, business positioning is the perception of a particular product in the customers’ mind. Many marketing campaigns are carried out with the mere purpose of business positioning. Effective business positioning requires significant planning and resources; however the approach is not limited to large businesses, small businesses can take advantage as well. Business positioning plays with the customers’ psychology and tries to carefully place the product or the service in their mind. You may have watched some particular advertisement of a popular brand and thought, what exactly was the idea behind this advertisement (especially if you do not fall in the targeted group of customers)? Chances are that this particular ad was a part of positioning strategy and meant for differentiating their product from its competitors. Business positioning is not a matter of a couple of advertisements, just like branding it is a long process aided by different marketing mediums. For good business positioning, you’ve got to have complete information about your customers, for example their age group, likes and dislikes, preferences and demands. Let’s assume, you are going to launch a cell phone for teenagers, you have added certain features which are most suitable for teenagers who are into online social networking. What you need to do is to communicate this idea to your targeted market (i.e. teenagers who are into social networking), that this cell phone is exclusively made for them or this is something that they really need. As you can see, branding is not entirely different from business positioning; in fact both of these terms are interrelated (branding being kind of a broader subject). Business positioning targets mainly the decision making process of buyers while branding takes care of the overall image of the product. Business positioning becomes relatively easier when your product has some clear advantages over its competitors. Many experts claim that business positioning is all about differentiation, which is not really wide of the mark. All you need to do is to highlight some unique selling point or competitor’s advantage to make sure that your business is positioned as the one that customers would like to purchase from. A business without a clear positioning strategy can get lost in no time, owing to the intense competition in the markets.
