Positioning for Competitive Advantage

Once a company has decided which segments of the market it shall enter, it must decide what positions it needs to occupy in those segments. A product's position is the means the product is defined by consumers on significant attributes-the place the product occupies in consumers' minds linked to competing products. Positioning involves implanting the brand's exclusive benefits and differentiation in customers' minds. Therefore, Tide is positioned like a powerful, all-purpose family detergent; in the automobile market, Subaru and Toyota are positioned on economy, Cadillac and Mercedes on luxury Consumers are overloaded with information regarding products and services. They can't re evaluate products each time they make a buying decision. To simplify the buying procedure, consumers organize products into categories-they "position" services, products and companies in their minds. A product's position is the complicated set of perceptions, impressions, and opinion that consumers have for the product compared having competing products. Consumers position products with / without the support of marketers. But marketers do not desire to leave their products' positions to possibility. They must plan positions that will provide their products the greatest advantage in choose target markets, and they have to design marketing mixes to create these planned positions.