A

STUDY ON
POSITIONING IN
SERVICE
MARKETING
POSITIONING:

Positioning is about communicating your unique selling advantage or proposition to your target
audience in everything you do. Marketing, sales, customer service. The consistency helps your
customer remember. Positioning allows a marketer to think about why a customer would want to
do business with them. What do you offer that the other producers don't? What does a potential
client get by doing business with you, that will serve their needs well?
Positioning has three components:
• What are your strengths? Your distinctive competencies? What about your offerings
provide value to your customers?
• Who is your target customer? What about them, makes them an ideal fit for the value you
offer?
• How are you different from your competitors in ways that your customers and potential
customers will value? In other words, what is your unique selling proposition? Your
competitive advantage?
When all three are put together, you have a positioning statement. Positioning statements are the
basis for all marketing messaging, sales scripts, and at a corporate level: branding.

What we want is relationship customers. No one survives in business with out a strong reputation
and referral customers. Customers who trust us to serve their needs. Who defend us, in light of
new product offerings, and service innovations. For them to do that, they need to know what we
stand for. They had a good experience with us, but time passes. They forget. But if they see our
messages, our positioning, then they remember and are pleased to do business with us, again.

When you consider the big picture, positioning is everything. It drives marketing plans, web
sites, recruiting and sales scripts. It is the basis of every conversation, every sales call, every
customer service interaction.

ROLE & IMPORTANCE OF POSITIONING:

Why is a positioning strategy so important? Because they’re a tiny little business plan boiled
down to one sentence. Granted, sometimes it’s a long sentence. But it succinctly defines the
target, their ‘pain point’, the category in which the company competes, their differentiated
benefits, and what the company must do to ‘prove’ those differentiated benefits to the
customer…developing a brand positioning strategy forces the company to consider what they
need to do to be successful.” —Brandeo

Positioning is undoubtedly one of the simplest and most useful tools to marketers. After
segmenting a market and then targeting a consumer, you would proceed to position a product
within that market.

Positioning is all about 'perception'. As perception differs from person to person, so do the results
of the positioning map e.g what you perceive as quality, value for money, etc, is different to my
perception. However, there will be similarities. Importance of Positioning can be described in
following points:

(1) Underlines the search for competitive advantage

(2) Market segmentation forms the basis for focused strategies
(3) Distinguishes a brand from its competitors
(4) Conduct internal, market & competitor analysis
(5) Plot competitive strategies

POSITIONING MAP:

Products or services are 'mapped' together on a 'positioning map'. This allows them to be
compared and contrasted in relation to each other. This is the main strength of this tool. Take a
look at the basic positioning map template below:

HIGH (VARIABLE 2)

HIGH LOW

(VARIABLE 1) (VARIABLE 1)

LOW (VARIABLE 2)

The marketer would draw out the map and decide upon a label for each axis. They could be price
(variable one) and quality (variable two), or Comfort (variable one) and price (variable two). The
individual products are then mapped out next to each other Any gaps could be regarded as
possible areas for new products.

Trout and Ries suggest a six-step question framework for successful positioning:

1. What position do you currently own?

2. What position do you want to own?
3. Whom you have to defeat to own the position you want.
4. Do you have the resources to do it?
5. Can you persist until you get there?
6. Are your tactics supporting the positioning objective you set?