Positioning and Branding

Although managers may easily recognize a product's segment in the life cycle, and use the opening model to find the dissimilarity between their product's genuine and apparent features, they often miscalculate customers' perception of their product in judgment to its competitor. Perceptual maps provide a visual symbol of where specific products fall within a category based on events  of what attributes  a customer is looking for in a product class, suggestive of how marketers should situation the product. A product grouping is a subset of the product class. For example, soft drinks are a product category, and lemon-lime sodas are a product class. So, for example, a product manager for 7 up might use a perceptual map to better appreciate how customers view 7 up in relation to their perception of Sprite.

Information on customer perceptions and preferences is obtained through advertising investigate and marketing survey techniques. For example, consumers may distinguish Ford trucks as organism more dependable than Chevy or Dodge trucks. The realism could be the conflicting, but it is the consumer insight that is significant.  Statistical analyses of the data supply results, which are more scientific and more easily used for predictive purposes. Once the dimensions of buyer awareness have been identified, a marketing manager can distinguish all products his or her company offers in relation to these dimensions, as well as charge the competition's product lines.

Figure is an example of the perceptual map of the passenger automobile market. The X axis represents the professed inverse association between youth, blame, and functionality on the part of clientele. The right side of the X axis denotes the most extreme awareness that people equate sports cars with youthfulness because they are less purposeful and practical, and functionality and level-headedness are adult concerns. Marketing executive can use this in sequence to pro- mote sports cars as inspiring youthful feelings in their owners, thus appealing to those who may feel pressure by adult concerns and perceive that purchasing a sports car will make them feel youthful and untroubled again.

The left side of the X axis denote the other extreme customer reaction, that a car with a elevated degree of functionality and fewer sportiness  is the more accountable mature choice. Marketing professionals address these perceptions by pleasing to a customer's sense of conservation, often through emphasizing a family compass reading when presenting a car through publicity.

The Y axis represents the price inconsistent linked with buying a car. The top of the Y axis represents luxury automobiles, known to be very luxurious. The bottom of the Y axis represents value automobiles, known to be slightest pricey.

Marketers appreciate, through client surveys, that these are the considerations most people believe before buying a car. Most people want some grouping of sportiness, luxury, functionality, and value for the dollars being exhausted. The combinations of these features that people choose, as represented by the cars they buy after articulate their portfolio of preference, are plotted on the X and Y axes.

Using a perceptual map yields many benefits for the advertising person. It clues the marketing person in to customer perception and misperceptions about a product by visually displaying the consumer perceptions and allowing the marketer to compare it to actuality. It facilitates successful product positioning, as the marketing person is now aware of what needs and preference the purchaser is looking to satisfy and can use this information to highlight the features and benefits of his or her creation that address the customer's concern.

The perceptual map can also identify new product potential for a company, as it highlights areas of the market and indicates how victorious products are in the eyes of the consumer. Perceptual maps can also avoid a company from making too many products within the same class; avoid cannibalization within a single company's product line. Cannibalization occurs when regulars purchase a new product in lieu of purchasing another product from the same company. For example, when Coke introduced Diet Coke, many consumers purchase Diet Coke instead of Coke. The enlarge in overall sales, however, from consumers who bought Diet Coke instead of other brand name drinks, makes the decline in Coke sales worthwhile. Finally, perceptual maps ensure that marketers stay well acquainted with the needs and desires of their target markets. Organization seeking to develop their brand also often uses perceptual maps and focus groups to appreciate how their products are professed in relative to similar products or brand on the market. According to the American Marketing Association, a product is a "name, expression, sign, symbol, or intend or a amalgamation of them intended to recognize the goods and military of one seller or group of sellers and to discriminate them from those of the opposition." Thus, while a brand is still manufactured goods, it is also one that adds other extent to differentiate it in some way from other products designed to gratify the same need. Products brands for an enormous array of products include: the Nike swoosh, Ralph Lauren's polo player, and Gateway's cow designs. Achieve the status enjoyed by the aforesaid brands is to say that those organization have high levels of product equity. Marketing professionals have miscellaneous opinions as to what precisely brand fairness is, but for our purposes we'll use the description David Aaker outlines in his book, Building Strong Brands: "Brand evenhandedness is a set of possessions (and liabilities) linked to a brand's name and symbol that adds to the value supply by a product or examine to a firm and/or that firm's customers. Aaker goes on to define brand equity into four asset categories: (1) name awareness; (2) brand loyalty; (3) apparent quality; and (4) brand relations.  In essence, it is what causes someone to buy the Advil brand ibuprofen even when they know a generic version has the exact same ingredients. Strong brand evenhandedness can mean more to a company than just trumping the contestant at the point of sale. Branding guru Kevin Keller provide a more specific and extensive list of the promising outcomes of building client-based brand equity:

• Less vulnerability to competitive marketing actions and crises
• Greater loyalty
• Larger limitations
• More elastic reply to price decreases
• More inelastic reaction to price increases
• Increased advertising communication efficiency and effectiveness
• Possible licensing opportunity
• More favorable brand additional room evaluation

Given this definition, of course every manager is involved in building physically powerful impartiality, but what are some of the victorious methods? Keller views the construction of product evenhandedness as dependent on three factors:

1. The original choices for the brand elements or identities making up the product.  Brand elements embrace: brand name, symbol, character, logo, packaging, and slogan; not every element of a brand will be incorporated in the plan to build brand equity. Apple has changed its slogan and packaging designs many times since the introduction of its first PC, but the apple symbol has remain a steady throughout.

2. The supporting marketing programs and the manner by which the brand is included into it. These programs include the marketing rudiments we have discussed throughout this chapter: price, distribution channels, product, and communications.

3. Other relations indirectly transfer to the brand by connecting it to some other entity. A good example of this was Volkswagen's current reintroduction of the VW Beetle-while the company relied on its standard branding style for the manufactured goods as a whole, it also only offered specific manufactured goods colors and option via Web-based purchases.

The challenges of construction brand fairness across geographic limitations, across product contributions, across diverse cultures and market segments also make it tricky to enumerate and appraise. However, marketers often use evaluative brand- related in sequence to inform future strategic decisions and therefore have developed some indirect and direct methods for measuring their brand evenhandedness. Details of tracking systems, brand audits, and brand management systems are too detailed for this chapter but are readily obtainable in the texts mentioned in the notes and resources accompanying this chapter.  We mention them because if you are going to build brand equity that lasts over time, you will need to also realize a means by which to evaluate your unique choices for each section of your client base. Of course, no matter how well you seek to build brand equity, if your creation isn't priced properly no one will want to buy it.