"Positioning" was rated as "the concept that has the greatest influence on American marketing in history" by the American Marketing Association, but why does positioning have a high voice in practice and little rain?

The "Positioning" Crisis of Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is based on 4P (product, price, channel and promotion). Kotler once said: "If the company produces the right products, sets the right prices, uses the right distribution channels, and is supplemented by the right promotional activities, then the company will succeed."

However, with the increasingly fierce competition, the popularization of marketing knowledge and the acceleration of imitation, people find that traditional marketing is increasingly difficult to work. Domestic mobile phone brands such as Bird, TCL and Lenovo have risen from glory to collective trouble in just a few years, and their strikingly similar trajectory is a symbol of the crisis faced by traditional marketing. So, what is the cause of this crisis?

In short, today has entered the era of strategic marketing. The weakest link in traditional marketing is strategy.

What is the strategy? Michael Porter, the world's top competitive strategist, once wrote in Harvard Business Review that strategy is positioning, that is, gaining a unique position by providing different value from competitors.

In fact, the word "positioning" became popular only after it was put forward by marketing guru Al Rees and Jack Trout. Little known is that the "positioning theory" founded by the two masters is essentially a new generation of marketing that is completely different from traditional marketing, and it is a systematic strategic theory. In The Battle of Marketing, a classic of positioning theory, Reese and trout said: "The choice of strategy and timing is the Himalayan mountains of marketing, and the others are only low mountains and short forests."

Kotler also attaches great importance to positioning, and regards positioning as a step of its strategic marketing 4p, namely: exploration (market research), division (market segmentation), priority ranking (target market selection) and positioning.

What is more influential than STP is another abbreviation, namely market segmentation, target market positioning and market positioning. Positioning here refers to finding the most important differentiation from competitors in a certain target market, and then using this as a strategy, designing and implementing a tactical 4P marketing mix to effectively spread this positioning.

Kotler said: "A series of marketing activities are based on STP."

However, it is precisely ST that gave P (positioning) to "ST" (everyone who has not traded stocks now knows what "ST" means).

Because the target market should not come from market segmentation, it is actually formed through positioning. In other words, the market you have to face is not a fixed consumer group delineated by internal thinking, but is determined by external consumer cognition. In the era of positioning, if you stubbornly determine a target market before positioning, you will undoubtedly be eliminated by marketing opponents with new ideas.

Market segmentation is "blind"

First of all, there is something wrong with "S". Market segmentation itself has become increasingly divorced from the market.

The concept of market segmentation came into being in 1950s, when the market environment was far less complicated than today. Although every marketing textbook has spent a lot of time introducing various segmentation methods for decades, in practice, this classic tool has increasingly become a "paper game".

The reason is that consumers have changed now. They are becoming more and more contradictory, fickle, personalized and multifaceted. They have gone out of the traditional demographic and psychological classification model, leaving behind those untrue characteristics. Although scholars' research on consumers' behavior and psychology is becoming more and more complicated, subdivided variables emerge one after another, and enterprises spend more and more money on market research, the actual use value is indeed out of proportion to the resources spent.

Another important factor is that your competitors can use the same market segmentation tools as you. What you see will be seen by your competitors. You think you are smart, but your competitors are not stupid. In this way, most of the target consumer groups defined by everyone are the same, although there will be a few different target groups, but the focus of advertising is not very different.

Market segmentation is in a helpless embarrassing situation. No wonder STP is perfect in theory, but it is not satisfactory in practical application. A lot of so-called "positioning" is nominal, and most of them are just subtle differences in tactical sense. For consumers, these subtle and complicated differences will only lead to confusion.

For example, all brands in the refrigerator industry are aiming at the fresh-keeping market, because according to the survey, the fresh-keeping function has become the most concerned factor for consumers to buy refrigerators, so Xinfei's "sterilization and fresh-keeping", Rong Sheng's "original ecology and fresh-keeping", Siemens' "0℃ fresh-keeping", Haier's "light wave fresh-keeping" and Meiling's "photocatalyst fresh-keeping" ... Have you seen any consumers buy refrigerators for these fresh-keeping technologies?

T: Choose, you are my chest pain forever.

At the "T" stage, STP has great defects. Because the traditional market segmentation is to analyze the existing market demand, when selecting the target market, the important criterion for evaluation is the market size. The first question asked is "How big is this market?"

The problem is that if consumers' choices change significantly in the future, they can't know what they might buy. A potential new market is often abandoned because it looks too small.

Before Xerox launched the 9 14 copier in 1959, it sold this patented product to IBM due to financial pressure. IBM hired a consulting company to do market research, and concluded that even if the existing thermal paper copier market is completely won by this new type of electrostatic plain paper copier, the total sales volume will not exceed 5,000, which is not enough to cover the investment in manufacturing new machines. So IBM rejected this patent of Xerox. This is one of the most important mistakes in IBM history.

Xerox completely ignores the research results and firmly believes that people will find its value. As a result, a few months after its launch, Fortune magazine praised it as "the most successful product in American history". A legendary big company was born like this.

Drucker, a master of management, also opposes market research on things that are not available in the market. He once said that if the development of household lighting system always depends on market research, then the kerosene lamps in the room will be highly complicated now.

Professor Christensen of Harvard University pointed out that large companies tend to please existing customers too much, focus on "continuous innovation", dare not try new products and practices, but cannot maintain prosperity. What can really win the vast business opportunities in the market is often a wolf in sheep's clothing-"destructive innovation", once established, will soon become the mainstream.

Christensen's "destructive technology" was originally "subversive technology". Disruption means destructive and divisive, and it originally refers to the meaning of "inconsistency" produced in evolution. In other words, the so-called "destructive innovation" is essentially a phenomenon expressed by the "law of differentiation", one of the most important laws in positioning theory.

Differentiation is the only way to successfully build a big brand, because there is only one source of brand strength, and that is to become the representative of a certain category. Therefore, STP often makes you miss some important hidden market opportunities, that is, differentiation-the opportunity to open new categories.

P: wishful division

Now let's talk about "P"-positioning. Positioning can be divided into two kinds from the practical connotation of application: psychological positioning and non-psychological positioning. Positioning in marketing is to find the most favorable position in the eyes of customers, that is, mental positioning. Finding a position that does not exist in the customer's mind is a non-mental position, such as the positioning of the target by launching missiles and the positioning of the division of labor by managers. Marketers often confuse these two fundamentally different orientations and position themselves out of the mental foundation. For example, TCL is positioned as the leader in the field of 3C convergence in China, which is doomed to be a failed goal, because there is no site named "3C" in the eyes of customers.

The analysis of STP is based on the competitive situation in the market, not the competitive situation in the eyes of customers, which leads to its positioning being wishful thinking in most cases. Marketers think it is differentiation, but customers don't agree. One of the most ingrained differentiation "myths" is that you will be the winner because you are better.

Kotler once taught: "A company can create value by making its products better, newer, faster or cheaper." "As long as the company does better than its competitors in some activities, it gains a competitive advantage." He regards "better", "newer", "faster" and "cheaper" as four ways to distinguish the company's products and services.

This seemingly powerful logic is undoubtedly in line with people's usual thinking, so everyone is enthusiastic and begins to compare the advantages of competitors by benchmarking (that is, Bechmarketing). Some even call benchmarking "the ultimate competitive strategy".

Subsequently, a paradox came into being: the more enterprises are good at traditional marketing methods, the more their strategies converge. There are many kinds of goods on the market, but in fact they are rarely separated and highly replaceable, and the choices that are really meaningful to consumers are rare. We can often see that all competitors in an industry are chasing after each other in a zero-sum game, profits are destroyed, and the scale of the industry is declining because everyone is crowded in a narrow space.

The competition in Japan's electronics industry is in this morbid state. Reese studied the financial performance of Hitachi, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sanyo in 2003 1994 ~ 10. The total profit is $3.2 billion, and the net profit rate of sales is only 0. 1%, while Dell's sales revenue is only 1/65444 of the total sales revenue of these six companies in the same period. Porter also wrote a book. Is Japan still competitive? Criticizing the Japanese-style mode of competition has no strategy, and it is a war of slandering each other in the same value dimension. If Japanese enterprises were stifled at home instead of globalization, they would undoubtedly be scarred.

Strategic marketing, positioning first

Kotler's STP model has long been regarded as the standard in the field of marketing, and it has hardly been questioned for decades. However, kotler himself pointed out in his "Horizontal Marketing" published in 2003 that basic marketing strategies like STP "gradually began to expose their shortcomings" and "can no longer lead us to reproduce the past glory". "Although the continuous use of market segmentation and positioning strategies can expand the scale, it will eventually lead to market saturation and extreme segmentation. In the long run, market segmentation will do more harm than good, which will reduce the success rate of new products. " Therefore, it is necessary to break through the traditional thinking and conduct horizontal marketing.

The problem is that kotler's horizontal marketing is just an innovative method using horizontal thinking, and it is not a new marketing concept strictly speaking. In fact, in his new edition of Marketing Management 12 in 2006, kotler still emphasized: "All marketing strategies are based on STP."

Although kotler recognized the limitations of STP, kotler didn't intend to reform it at all, because this thinking framework is very logical. However, marketing is a practical knowledge. In practice, STP is the most useless method to determine the target market of creative (rather than mediocre) marketing activities.

So how do you determine your target market?

The answer is to determine the target market according to the brand positioning.

Positioning is competition-oriented. The most important premise of positioning is to determine who your competitors are. Then you need to find the position of competitors in the eyes of customers, or find a valuable and unoccupied position by repositioning competitors, and then spread this position clearly to customers through consistent marketing activities to seize it. When customers have the corresponding cognition, your target market will naturally form. This is the whole process of effective strategic marketing in the positioning era.

How to locate Wang Laoji with STP? All herbal teas can be prevented from getting angry, otherwise they will not be called "herbal teas". Obviously, we can't put forward the positioning of "preventing getting angry" by market segmentation, otherwise so many herbal tea brands would have taken the lead. Of course, if you are willing to be wise after the event, you can also rack your brains to prove that STP is still effective, but you will find that it is not convincing.

In fact, the process of "preventing drinks from catching fire"-making Wang Laoji go out of Guangdong and sell nationwide-is direct and simple. It uses the opposite positioning method. In view of the function that ordinary soft drinks can only temporarily cool down and quench their thirst, Wang Laoji stood on the opposite side, only mentioning one point, telling everyone that drinks can also prevent getting angry, thus separating themselves from competing categories and easily entering consumers' minds. People who are afraid of getting angry, have the need to prevent getting angry, and even want to reduce the fire have become its target market.

Note that the order here is subversive, positioning is the first, and there is no need for market segmentation and target market selection before positioning. Market research is of course necessary, but your task is no longer to segment the market, but to understand the "competitive map" in customers' minds, find vacancies, and then seize it to influence consumers' choices.

For example, when Mengniu started, its positioning was to attach itself to Yili, "learn from Yili" and "strive to be the second brand of dairy industry in Inner Mongolia". This is the method of correlation positioning. For a category, people can hold up to seven brands in their minds, but when people only know the boss, Mengniu shrewdly seized the second position. What should we do if we use STP?

Re-understanding "Positioning"

STP grafted "positioning" on the outdated model, so that the effect was not obvious. However, it should be noted that the positioning theory does not completely deny the role of market segmentation and target market selection. In fact, after positioning your target market, you must subdivide the target market and combine your resources to design more effective tactics to improve marketing efficiency.

The strategic marketing of positioning theory advocates getting rid of the rigid form of S-T-P and injecting a kind of soul into the whole marketing process, that is, the so-called "wonderful operation, single mind"-this "mind" refers to the mind of customers, not just the creativity of marketers. The customer's mind is the ultimate battlefield of marketing. Your positioning must win the customer's cognition. Otherwise, no matter how reasonable your positioning plan is, people's brains will not log in, and the target market will only be your "painting cake". Many commercial wars fail because they don't understand this simple truth and have made a lot of efforts in vain.

To make a correct positioning, we should also break the superstition of customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. The truth of the matter is that consumers are contradictory and fickle, and few brands can make people absolutely loyal (even those consumers who only use one brand are usually too small to have special marketing value). In most cases, buyers have a brand list and buy brands with different functions and uses. People sometimes yearn for change.

Positioning remains relatively stable. In fact, the more unpredictable consumers are, the stronger your brand will be. In this way, in a constantly changing world, your brand will firmly occupy an attribute with a unique image and occupy a word in the minds of consumers. When consumers have relevant needs, they will naturally take your brand as the first choice. For example, among the three shampoo brands owned by Procter & Gamble, Rejoice once focused on "suppleness", Head & Shoulders focused on "dandruff removal" and Pan Ting advocated "nutrition". Many people have bought these three products. For example, Volvo stands for "safety", Mercedes-Benz stands for "prestige" and BMW stands for "driving the machine".

Unfortunately, there are few examples of healthy competition among brands in an industry in China. China color TV industry has been on the verge of the collapse of the whole industry several times in the past ten years.

Enterprises in China urgently need to re-understand the "positioning" to get rid of the zero-sum game. When everyone is truly separated from each other in the eyes of consumers, the overall market can be expanded, so that many companies can succeed at the same time, and new corporate goals and new ways of competition will emerge one after another to promote the prosperity of the whole industry, instead of everyone squeezing into an unprofitable market to kill each other. The future of China brand and the development of China market depend on it.