Choosing Specific POPs and PODs
To build a strong brand and avoid the commodity trap, marketers must start with the belief that you can differentiate anything.
A commodity trap is where a company sees its competitive position being eroded so that it can no longer command a premium price in its market. In a commodity trap, consumers receive more product benefits for their money or pay lower prices for the same or lower levels of benefits.
Michael Porter urged companies to build a sustainable competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is a company’s ability to perform in one or more ways that competitors cannot or will not match.
Marketers typically focus on brand benefits in choosing the points-of-parity and points-of-difference that make up their brand positioning. Brand attributes generally play more of a supporting role by providing “reasons to believe” or “proof points” as to why a brand can credibly claim it offers certain benefits.
Multiple attributes may support a certain benefit, and they may change over time. The obvious, and often the most compelling, means of differentiation for consumers are benefits related to performance. To identify possible means of differentiation, marketers have to match consumers’ desire for a benefit with their company’s ability to deliver it.
For choosing specific benefits as POPs and PODs to position a brand, perceptual maps may be useful.
Perceptual maps are visual representations of consumer perceptions and preferences. They provide quantitative pictures of market situations and the way consumers view different products, services, and brands along various dimensions.
By overlaying consumer preferences with brand perceptions, marketers can reveal “openings” that suggest unmet consumer needs and marketing opportunities.
For example, Figure 7.1 shows a hypothetical perceptual map for a beverage category. The four brands—A, B, C, and D—vary in terms of how consumers view their taste profile (light versus strong) and personality and imagery (contemporary versus traditional). Also displayed on the map are ideal point “configurations” for three market segments (1, 2, and 3). The ideal points represent each segment’s most preferred (“ideal”) combination of taste and imagery. Brand A is seen as more balanced in terms of both taste and imagery.
On Figure 7.1 are two possible repositioning strategies for Brand A. By making its image more contemporary, Brand A could move to A’ to target consumers in Segment 1 and achieve a point-of-parity on imagery and maintain its point-of-difference on taste profile with respect to Brand B.
By changing its taste profile to make it lighter, Brand A could move to A” to target consumers in Segment 2 and achieve a point-of-parity on taste profile and maintain its point-of-difference on imagery with respect to Brand C. Deciding which repositioning is most promising, A’ or A”, would require detailed consumer and competitive analysis.
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