If you sample products in the same category most often the nuances are very difficult to trace making it difficult to establish the superiority or as a matter of fact inferiority of a product over others. The pertinent question that haunts an entrepreneur is – “How can I position my brand?” Although it is difficult, but positioning of your brand is not impossible with the application of a dash of ingenuity.
The classic positioning techniques are the monopoly of the ad agencies that requiring changing the tag line for your product and developing some new ads for your product. Unfortunately, this conventional positioning method always does not succeed. Perhaps what we need is a more holistic approach that might go to the extent of changing the fundamental structure of your organization.
It might by apt to cite an example given my positioning strategies expert Ed Roach in this context. While working for a consumer food products company Roach found that, the fruit product of his client and its competitors were more or less of the similar standards based on the three main criteria – size, appearance and firmness. However, there was a fourth criteria that was missing from the rating of the products and that was the taste. Taste was found to be based on preferences of individual customers that varied greatly from customer to customer. Instead of leaving the branding of the product to the highly variable customer preference, Roach thought that taste should be standardized as a criterion to affect branding of the product. Two leading agricultural universities in Canada and USA were contacted to develop processes independently that ‘tested for test’ based on the bar set by the company. Now this fruit product is the ‘only fruit tested for taste’. This is how we position brands even if it means changing industry standards and evolving new standards for the sake of your product.
