Literature Review On Positioning

LITERATURE REVIEW
Positioning: The Long Way to Birth

According to (Warren, 1916), the concept of positioning might be traced back to Classical
Greece, when Plato described that memories recall other memories, raising multiple associations.
Later on, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the three ‘Laws of Associations’ were
developed from this concept, in order to describe the complex structure of associations formed
by basic interpretations. Supported by several studies in psychology of human memory, the
business utility of positioning has been gaining more attention from practitioners and researchers
only in recent decades, when the concept was gradually associated with brand building
processes. (Wagner, 1996)
The concept of positioning further evolved, when it became clear that brand advertising alone
was no more the ultimate effective tool to increase sales and ensure a ‘bright future’. Since the
Fifties, the booming period of wealth and optimism, the battle field of multi-billionaire brands,
company strategies have been going through several changing processes, primarily due to
transformations of lifestyles and surrounding environments. The authors of the book
“Positioning: a battle for your Mind” are an example of this evolution, given their professional
expertise in the field of advertising, and their progressively increasing fame in the field of
marketing. Given the several changes in the field, it would be useful to have an overview of
major periods and changes in marketing and sales strategies. (Al Ries, 2000)
In 2001 Ries and Trout suggest a strategy to boost sales in the market dominated by both me-too
products and companies. It is the first time that the term “positioning” appears. As later noticed
the same authors, the concept was coined for the industrial sector, while it interestingly gained
status when widened to address the business-to-consumers arena. In an exacerbated context of
noise, brands, products, and commercial information overload, the concept of positioning comes
to save companies and their stocked products. The positioning era represents a new perspective
towards communication: positioning is about getting effectively listened to in a noisy
marketplace. According to (Al Ries, 2001), positioning is the natural consequence of three main
and subsequent phenomena, i.e. the media explosion, the product explosion combined with the
limited amount of information that can be processed by the human brain, and the advertising
explosion. With the idea of positioning, consumers acquire a definitive central role in
determining the company strategy.
Positioning: It’s Role in Existing Marketing Theories

Positioning is not about the product, but what the buyer thinks about the product or organization.
The physical nature of the product is not of great importance when dealing with positioning;
instead, it is the perception of the product that matters. According to (Marsden, 2002), the
concept of positioning refers to the brand position in the consumer mind in relation to the values
which differentiate the brand’s given or owned associations. Thus, the development of a
positioning strategy might require an analysis of stakeholder perceptions and attitudes towards
branded products and organizations, since these perceptions may not correspond to brand
manager perceptions and intended positioning.
Positioning constitutes the bridge between a corporation and its target, thus it “becomes the
actual designing of the company’s image so that the target customers understand and appreciate
what the company stands for in relation to its competitors, it “involves a firm’s total approach to
competing, not just its product or target customer group.” In related literature, positioning is
mainly considered as being part of the marketing communication process, thus as being primarily
directed to external stakeholders. As a consequence, positioning is rarely described as a strategic
competitive tool. (Kotler, 1991)
In consumer markets, established brands use communications to position themselves in

respective categories108. However, positioning is not a prerogative of business-to-business or
business-to-consumer brands and products; “Organizations are also positioned relative to one
another, mainly as a consequence of their corporate identity, whether they are deliberately
managed or not (Kotler P. A., 2001).
The position an organization takes in the minds of consumers may be the only means of
differentiating one product from another.” One of the crucial differences between the product
and the corporate brand positioning is that the last one needs to be communicated to a much
larger audience of stakeholders, whereas the product brand is focused on a specific target of
consumers and buyers within the network. The management of the position might be absolutely
necessary to survive in contexts defined by low entry barriers; where competition is extremely
intense and a constant competitive positioning has to be achieved. “Positioning is about visibility
and recognition of what a product/service represents for a buyer”. (Lambin, 2004)
Positioning is the link bonding the process of targeting to the outcome of the communication. It
“is the communications element of the segmentation process in that the marketing mix needs to
be communicated to the target market buyers”. This communication should be executed in such a
way that the product occupies a particular position in the minds of each buyer, relative to the
offerings of competitive products. Successful positioning can only be achieved by adopting a
customer perspective, understanding how customers perceive products in the class and how they
attach importance to particular attributes. The development of a positioning statement is the
outcome of the review of the segmentation and targeting processes and it is of vital importance
for the communication strategy to be successful. In this perspective, positioning constitutes the
conclusive concept of the marketing process sequences (Fill, 2002).
Bibliography
Al Ries, J. T. (2001). Positioning: The Battle for your Mind (20th anniversary edition). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Al Ries, J. T. (2000). Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. McGraw Hill Professional.
Fill, C. (2002). Marketing Communications. Contexts, Strategies and Applications. New Jersey: Pearson
Education.
Kotler, P. A. (2001). Principles of Marketing. New Jersey: Pearson Education.
Kotler, P. (1991). Marketing Management: Analysis, planning, implementation and control. Hemel
Hempstead: Prentice Hall.
Lambin, J.-J. t. (2004). Marketing strategico e operativo. Market driven management. Italy: McGraw-Hill.
Marsden, P. (2002). Brand positioning: meme’s the word,. Marketing Intelligence and Planning , 307-
312.
Wagner, W. V. (1996). Relevance, discourse and the ‘hot’ stable core of socialrepresentations: a
structural analysis of word associations. British Journal of Social Psychology , 331-352.
Warren, H. C. (1916). Mental association from Plato to Hume. Psychological Review , 208-230.

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What are the major periods and changes in marketing and sales strategies mentioned in the text?

What is positioning according to the text?

LITERATURE REVIEW

Positioning: The Long Way to Birth

Positioning: It’s Role in Existing Marketing Theories

In consumer markets, established brands use communications to position themselves in

Kotler, P. A. (2001). Principles of Marketing. New Jersey: Pearson Education.

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