Positioning is essential, anything and everything from
political parties to candy bars need to be positioned. Not positioning a
product or service is fatal. But always the product or service creates its own
space and definition in the minds of the consumer. Hence no-positioning is seen
only in the textbooks. But once you take a conscious step in positioning your
product, challenge arises. But so do opportunity.
It was the brilliant positioning of
Apple that made Apple the Apple we know today so is the same with all others who succeeded. It all gets cornered to how people
see your product among many other in a store rack. Your job does not end with
getting your product to the market; in fact it starts there. The consumer after
doing a scan of alternatives compares, decides, justifies and reinforces their
decision. And it’s all based on one factor – positioning.
Hence positioning must be done, and done well. We saw why no-positioning
usually does not happen. Even if you don’t formally position it, consumers use
and position it by themselves by taking into their experience and comparisons
with others.
Multi-positioning is the only way in which you can create a
no-positioning effect for your product or service. And trust Me., you don’t
want to do that! Multi positioning is a situation where you give more than one
positioning to your product. For instance let’s consider an Italian restaurant
in U.S of A, Italian in respect to its name, colors used, menu, furniture, except
for its tagline which says “Flavors of America”. The not so familiar with
marketing retired executive believes he can get both the Italian consumers who
live in the region as well as the local Americans. What an awesome plan, Sir.
Spare no one! But this is a very bad idea. And it’s all about the danger in
confusing the consumer, but I will get to that.
Let’s see another
multi positioning illustration. I want to buy a car, a very expensive one. I
Google and get obsessed with this one car that has got the body of the latest
supercar in town say some model of Lamborghini. The only problem being that it’s
marketed by a company that has tradition of selling cheap cars. I will not buy that, social acceptance is the
problem. The car is good but consumers position it as cheap because it’s sold
by a cheap brand. And in case I want to buy a cheap car, I just love this car;
social acceptance is not a problem but way out of my price range. A car
initially created with a hope of getting both the markets fail to get even one
of them. Practical example could be of Maruti Suzuki Grand Vitara Indian
launch, a 1.7 million (Indian bucks) car sold by a car whose biggest hits and
most cars fall in the below 500 thousand range. Rich people dint want a Maruti
Suzuki label and middle income loyal customers of the company just could not
afford it! Big time failure.
Facebook, Rolls Royce, Sony, Apple, Amazon, let’s take any
big names, none of them have been able to successfully multi position
themselves, It just do not work that way. You multi position with hopes of
getting different classes of people and you get none. You may focus it broad
but its different, let’s consider the Italian restaurant example once again.
There is no problem if they position it as a complete Italian or just limited
to pizzas its broad and narrow positioning. Not multi positioning.
Why exactly does multi positioning
fail, all the time?
2 reasons, first
Every consumer believes that every other person has the same feeling he
has about a product or service. In other words, he thinks there is only one way
of viewing a product and that is the way he views. When a consumer see a high
or low quality T-shirt under a brand name, which he believes to be cheap he
assumes the community he often interacts with views it cheap. Hence he reaches
a conclusion to buy or reject the T-shirt. If he does not want to position
himself as cheap there is a great possibility that he will reject the T-shirt.
Secondly
People hate to be confused! They
hate it so much so that they will usually not even give it a try to figure out
and clear the doubt. I have read somewhere- “If you cannot convince them,
confuse them!” Please don’t try this with your customers (works good with
teachers though). If you do not confuse them then at least some you can
convince but if you confuse, none will you be able to convince.
