Can our brand value positioning protect us from price competition?

Q: I’m a marketing director.  Our company sells our frozen fish, and our packaged and bottled dried fish mainly in supermarkets.  All of our products are a bit higher in price against competition because our frozen as well as dried fish are really fresh.  That means we freeze or dry immediately after catching the fish.  In fact, freezing and drying are executed within an hour after catching.  All our price competitors don’t do this.  In fact, especially for smoked fish, for example, many process the unsold “fresh” fish at the end of the day when their worth is just as animal feeds and not for food.  As you can expect, it costs more to commit to our fish’s “freshness.”  And this is why so our retail price is higher versus competition.

But consumers don’t seem to appreciate this “freshness value.”  As more and more price competitors enter our product category, we keep losing market share.  There’s a clear trend we’ve seen where more and more consumers are shifting their frozen and dried fish purchases in favor of the competing price brands.

During our recent brand review with our ManCom, we were instructed to invest and advertise our “freshness” positioning. But we have been doing precisely that for many years now.  So we don’t believe the solution against intensifying price competition is in brand positioning.  Or maybe we’re wrong.  Is our brand’s correct response to the entry of more and more price competitors still in positioning of our brand’s distinctive “freshness” value and attribute?  Please help.

A: Unlike in the US; in the Philippines, positioning on your brand’s higher value and advertising it by naming your price competitors is not allowed.  But what you can do is to go for a “disguised” comparative positioning.  This is known as “competitive repositioning.”

It’s a positioning strategy targeting the competitor’s brand more than your own brand.  For example, in the ’90s, Del Monte pineapple juice did just this to other pineapple juice brands but without naming names.  In its TV commercial, Del Monte pineapple juice first showed a small young girl reading a label of a competitor pineapple juice brand.  The label had all sorts of chemical sounding ingredients.  Then, the TV commercial showed a boy reading a Del Monte label that said this:  “Ingredients—Natural pineapple juice and Vitamin C.”  Obviously, the TV commercial underscored how the competitive brand boasted of its chemical contents whereas Del Monte uses only 100 percent natural ingredients.

This is the first form of competitive repositioning.  It’s repositioning the competition by mere terminological difference between Del Monte and the competitor.  But there was no real difference between Del Monte pineapple juice and the competing brand in terms of ingredients.

The competitive repositioning only expressed what Del Monte pineapple juice had which the competitor brand also had but “differentiated” by the use of different vocabularies for the same set of product attributes.

There’s a second form of competitive repositioning and it’s easy to guess what it is.  It’s the opposite of the terminological competitive repositioning. This form calls attention to real, objective difference in product attribute or value.  This was the case of how FERN-C repositioned Ascorbic Acid or what’s more popularly known as Vitamin C.

FERN-C consumer research showed how a big enough segment of category users were in search for a non-acidic Vitamin C.  This segment wanted all of Ascorbic Acid Vitamin C benefits like protection against infectious diseases such as flu and even cold, and against the damaging effects of free radicals and even cancer.  However, consumers in this segment wanted all these benefits but without the Vitamin C sting.  And that’s precisely what FERN-C proved that its brand has.  It was a Vitamin C in Sodium Ascorbate form which is non-acidic.

In effect, FERN-C repositioned all Ascorbic Acid Vitamin C brands by creating another Vitamin C category, the Sodium Ascorbate Vitamin C.

The case of pHCare defines yet a third form of competitive repositioning.  In entering the feminine wash category in 2000, pHCare was careful not to confront the dominant market leader brand, Lactacyd.  It did this by presenting pHCare as a feminine wash with a 5.5 pH balance.

This pH balance spec made the brand specifically suited for daily use in women’s external genitalia.  In contrast, Lactacyd’s 3.5 pH balance was more suited for vaginal application in cases of infection like UTI.  So by positioning in the other variant of pH balance where Lactacyd did not belong, pHCare effectively repositioned Lactacyd in an occasional usage segment in sharp contrast to its positioning in the daily usage segment.

If you wish to explore the competitive repositioning strategy against price competitors, you have the foregoing three alternative forms to choose from.  In terms of ease of application, it should be clear to you that the first form is the easiest followed by the third form.  So it’s the second form that’s usually the more difficult.

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!