In brand positioning research, why separate pricing?
Question: We’re brothers and classmates in your marketing research course at the Ateneo Master in Entrepreneurship program. Our brand is in a very competitive consumer durable industry. From one year to the next, our brand swings from being a serious challenger to just a major contender.
In our most recent usage, attitude, image study, buyers rated all brands to be practically the same in all major product attributes or values. Price came out as the key driver of brand purchase.
We remember you telling us that in crafting our marketing mix for the brand, we should not mix pricing and positioning. That’s why we separated the UAI from price sensitivity. But over the past five or more years, price has been driving buyer brand choice. So now we want to research pricing as a positioning attribute. Please help.
Answer: You are right but you are also wrong. You are right in separating positioning research in your UAI from price sensitivity testing. But that rule must be followed in crafting your marketing mix. It’s in the context of the marketing mix where that separation applies. It does not apply in other contexts like in positioning research.
In your brand positioning decision, you’re free to include pricing in the positioning research. In fact, you are already doing that. So pricing as a marketing mix lever should not be confused with pricing as a product positioning attribute or value.
Why do I say that you’re already including pricing as a product attribute or value in your positioning research via the UAI Image Section? You’re doing this by labeling pricing as an attribute not as “pricing” but by another synonym. Most UAI that I’ve seen used either the attribute or value termed as “affordable” or “value-for-money.” In my years with UAI studies, I’ve found that the better term between these two is value-for-money.
The reason why we’ve really not settled on the better attribute term is that we’ve neglected to dig deeper and to analyze what we must understand about “value-for-money.”
So let’s now ask these two critical insighting questions: “Whose value?” and “What value?”
Whose value? In the specific circumstances of your brand, the concern is with your current product and brand buyers.
As you said, these buyers regard all competing brands as “practically the same in all major product attributes or values.” This brings us to the second question: “What value?”
We start from the concept of price and values by Harvard’s Professor Ted Levitt who said: “Whether existing or new, the price of a product is the sum total of its values.” So our question is not “what value” but “what values” because price is a summary of your product’s values.
Where can the process go wrong when relating pricing to product values in UAI’s Image Section? That’s in at least two places. The first in the selection of the product attributes or values to rate in importance and then against which customers will rate the performances of the competing brands including yours. It’s not a matter of being comprehensive about those product attributes or values. The validating question is: “Did you sample the product attributes or values that really matter to your customers?” If your sampling is wrong, then it follows that their summarizing by your pricing will also be wrong.
Your second validating question is just as consequential. That’s about the analysis of those values to uncover the motivating positioning value. Ask then: “Did you analyze the attribute or value data according to more than just one customer positioning behavior model?”
Conventional practice has actually imprisoned the UAI Image Section to analyzing according to just one customer positioning behavior model.
This model stipulates that the winning positioning for a brand is about a customer priority product value and that is at the same time what the customer perceives as the brand’s differentiator.
In the highly competitive setting where you said you’re in, this is the customer positioning behavior that’s the hardest to uncover. It’s therefore not the positioning model to work with.
What has worked well under condition of hyper competition is the “satisfier” positioning model. This is basically positioning in just a product value that’s important but a customer priority which is “unexpected.” Because it’s unexpected, when it’s not there, customers don’t mind. However, when it happens to be around, customers become happy and even delighted. That’s the character of a “satisfier” and so the name.
There are many examples. Consider Volvo’s positioning at one time on silence inside the car that keeps the baby inside asleep. Or Motolite’s positioning on the “torture test” for its battery. Or Johnson Baby Shampoo’s positioning on “doesn’t hurt eyes.”
The intense and intensifying competitive condition is true with the premium car category, the automotive battery market, and the shampoo industry. This may work just as well with your consumer durable customers and market segment. So my MRx is for you not to remain a prisoner of the UAI’s dedication to the priority value plus differentiator positioning model. Extend the Image Section model to include the necessary questionnaire items on the satisfier positioning model. It’s that positioning model’s motivating satisfier value that will then prescribe your appropriate pricing.
Keep your questions coming. Send them to me at [email protected].
