Marketing Management, 15/E With Indian Case Study

In assessing potential threats from competitors, three high-level variables are useful: Share of market— The competitor’s share of the target market. Share of mind— The percentage of customers who named the competitor in responding to the statement “Name the first company that comes to mind in this industry.” Share of heart— The percentage of custo

Often a good positioning will have several PODs and POPs. Of those, often two or three really define the competitive battlefield and should be analyzed and developed carefully. A good positioning should also follow the “90–10” rule and be highly applicable to 90 percent (or at least 80 percent) of the products in the brand.

A person’s emotional response to a brand and its marketing will depend on many factors. An increasingly important one is the brand’s authenticity.29 Brands such as Hershey’s, Kraft, Crayola, Kellogg’s, and Johnson & Johnson that are seen as authentic and genuine can evoke trust, affection, and strong loyalty.

We can examine competition from both an industry and a market point of view.7 An industry is a group of firms offering a product or class of products that are close substitutes for one another. ... Using the market approach, we define competitors as companies that satisfy the same customer need. For example, a customer who buys a word-processing so

For brands anticipating rapid growth, it is helpful to define the product or benefit space in which the brand would like to compete, as Nike did with “athletic performance” and Disney with “family entertainment.” Words that describe the nature of the product or service, or the type of experiences or benefits the brand provides, can be critical to i

one common challenge in positioning is that many of the benefits that make up points-of-parity and points-of-difference are negatively correlated.

A good positioning has one foot in the present and one in the future. It needs to be somewhat aspirational so the brand has room to grow and improve. Positioning on the basis of the current state of the market is not forward looking enough, but at the same time, the positioning cannot be so removed from reality that it is essentially unobtainable.

Often a brand’s positioning transcends its performance considerations. Companies can fashion compelling images that appeal to consumers’ social and psychological needs. The primary explanation for Marlboro’s extraordinary worldwide market share (about 30 percent) is that its “macho cowboy” image has struck a responsive chord with much of the cigare

PERCEPTUAL MAPS For choosing specific benefits as POPs and PODs to position a brand, perceptual maps may be useful. Perceptual maps are visual representations of consumer perceptions and preferences. They provide quantitative pictures of market situations and the way consumers view different products, services, and brands along various dimensions.