Positioning from "seed to table"

Product positioning-as defined- “the position in your consumers minds relative to your competition” appears on the surface to be customer centric. But backing from the term customer and broadening it to stakeholders helps rediscover and uncover more of your identity, whether it is the aspired, communicated or mirrored image you desire.
So, what is your positioning in the minds say… of your suppliers? As we know, supply chain management has become a highly successful form of managing profit by not only reducing expenses, but by having product available at the right place, the right time, in the right form and at the right price to the satisfaction of your consumers.

How is it that you build a quality, reliable and reciprocal relationship with your suppliers such that you are more profitable?
Positioning. Understanding where your suppliers are relative to their competition takes time and energy on the part of the buying center, but it is research well worth the effort. The manner in which you explore and investigate your suppliers is as essential as the research you perform to understand your customer behavior. Key questions include the quality of the product, price, financial health, capacity, distribution, warehousing, access to resources, investment in R&D…the list is endless and mirrors the same checklist done internally in your organization to diagnose your own health and forecast your own growth. The qualitative and quantitative value analysis that you execute with your suppliers in easily transferred into your own health and growth potential. It is clear that their costs and their ability to manage costs become your costs. Their mission and vision also become integrated by association and assembly into your final product. Think of internal branding cases such as “Intel inside.” The practices of the supplier are so credible and reliable that the end product chooses to boast and borrow from the equity of the brand of its own suppliers. Are you able to state to your end users what ingredients are inside? Have you managed your suppliers in such a way that you can build your own equity derived from theirs? Have you formed a relationship with them such that business activities are transparent?
Rather than pit yourself against your supplier for the low bid, and milking every drop of profit from their margin, position yourself as a strategic annex to their operations. Negotiate win-win. Form strategic pricing agreements. Arrange exclusive distribution as a reseller. When they are THAT good, so are you. And when you are THAT good, they cannot ignore how valuable your business model is.

Positioning with power.I have a friend who loves to negotiate. He can zing power play one liners across the table faster than they can be processed. He is powerful and negotiation makes him more powerful. But he has suppliers that flee from his presence and even customers who question his intentions. Be cautious that your power is not your position. Your position should always be to build a better business relationship so that there is not a dominant or supply chain leader, but there is an integration of the business model from seed to table.

Back to customer based product positioning. The healthiest place to start positioning yourself in your consumers’ minds is to be clear on the position of your suppliers relative to their competition and to establish a position in their minds that a symbiotic relationship with your firm is the only chance for survival. When you benefit from a healthy and favorable relationship with your supplier, your final product is more attractive to the consumer and more profitable for you as a result.

IF you wish to explore how to go about creating a good relationship with your suppliers and how to uncover more information about their positioning, just ASK.

March….
Evoked set of responses for the month of March….spring, green beer, perhaps regional weather conditions, but almost assuredly: March Madness. In researching the origin of March Madness it appears that basketball pairings accompanied by insatiable fans has been around since 1930 when Henry V. Porter coined the term March Madness as the title article written for the IHSA magazine Illinois Interscholastic.

If you haven’t already completed your brackets, or thrown a few bucks into the office pool, you may not get the gist of this month’s blog. But if you follow positioning and competitive review, stand by; it will all be covered.

Observing my son and my husband collaborate on the science of bracketology was an ethnographical study for which I was ill prepared. For I had presumptuously thought that the strategic selection of who would advance to the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, Final Four or Championship would have been based on a solid competitive review of statistics, coaching, historical perspective, trend analysis, pairings and perhaps even the scouting reports of experts. Not so. Duke was eliminated simply because my son and husband refused to allow themselves to place those four letters alongside each other as that would somehow cheapen their allegiance to UNC. Alas I have in my midst newly pledged brothers of the Binghamton Bearcats fraternal fan base, or perhaps they are fully initiated members of the Alpha Beta Delta chapter….Anyone But Duke.

After watching the process of selection by these two brilliant men; one mid -forty with the mindset of an engineer and one nearing adolescence with the mindset of victory at all costs, I witnessed a strange phenomenon rarely expressed by these two. They were actually acting upon….emotions. Emotions and loyalty and experiences were being pulled into this process, even though a clear investment was on the line.

Now how can this be?

This is the behavior of consumers who consciously or subconsciously associate themselves with specific reference groups and also have a sagacity of who or what to disassociate themselves with/from. Remember Sully and his life saving ditch on the Hudson? Those Bostonians were certainly grateful to be pulled from the water, but watch the interview…it pained them that New Yorkers….Yankee fans….were part of the process. They have spent their lives being dedicated loyal Red Sox fans and being rescued by a Yankee fan…well it certainly added some interest to the news story.

As we approach our intended audience, buyers or consumers, we must realize that a number of emotions, experiences, and linking ideas are swept into the decision process. Focusing on the tangibles of our offerings prevents us from providing our customers with the entire storyline to our products and services. We must develop the plot, the setting, the characters of the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase experiences so that our consumers are not simply reading or watching our story. They must be a critical role and be a part of the story to ensure that our brand and offerings are flagged and stored into memory with emotion. We must also understand what types of emotions are linked to our competitors by the same set of decision makers. You product may not seem “peppy” or “sincere” but ask your consumers to describe your product in terms of emotions and other intangible characteristics and you may be surprised by your findings. Determine what they say about your competitors....even better.

As buyers we do not intend to act emotionally on our purchases. We approach the decisions with information, personal historical perspective, opinion leaders’ recommendations, a full array of formal or informal research to help us make the best choice. We believe that we are being rational; we also think we are prudent and careful, just as economics teaches us to be. But in the moment, when it comes time to associate ourselves with a product or distance ourselves from a product, it isn’t always isolated to specifics, details, attribute, features or prices. It comes down to which purchase is more satisfying to our psyche. Which item fits into the “position” in our mindset?

My father-in-law likes to argue with me about this concept. He claims he pays no attention to advertising or anything that might cause him to act irrationally. He insists that he always buys the private label brand just to “show” those name brands…hmm…doesn’t that sound like dissassociative behavior? Knowing that he is also a trivia buff, and after waiting about a half an hour after his initial “I am a rational consumer” assertion. I said, “Daddad, does your bologna have a first name?” He immediately started singing a familiar jingle…and I responded with “aha”. Though he is adamant that advertising has no effect on his purchases, he could not argue that it did not have an effect on his memory. Private label loyal consumers still must have identified the other choices in order to evaluate. Daddad could not remove that jingle from his memory and therefore the association with bologna was not the store brand, but the name brand. And by the way, private label loyal consumers are not different than brand loyal consumers. The loyalty, the reference group and the consistency of the behavior is what we as marketers hope to achieve. Daddad is part of the private label loyal consumer storyline and his attitude, “name brand ads have no effect on me” helps build that character profile. Giant Foods, Publix, Kroger…they spent just as much time ensuring that the Daddads of the world have a positive experience with their private labels, they just don’t bother to craft catchy jingles…yet.
Duke went on to win, and my husband and son moved back several positions in their pool. Without a doubt it was ultimately very satisfying to hope that Duke might have lost. For it is better to lose money in a pool, rather than to ever elevate Duke up a bracket. Madness!

If you are weary of the madness displayed by your audience, and you would like your consumers to be a part of your storyline, just ASK. dcolemanaskcommunications@gmail.com

Kinesthesis is defined as the ability to sense the position and location and orientation and movement of the body and its parts.

I asked a colleague, a professor of neuropsychology, to explain it in more detail and found this term to be a fascinating phenomenon. *Note -I try to metaphorically/analogously relate just about everything I learn to strategic planning for an organization.

Thus:

Kinesthesis~(As explained by my colleague) when you move, you sense it. When you reach to pick up a gallon milk jug, you are immediately aware of the precise level of flex, stretch and grasp you must use to pick up that gallon of milk. As the milk jug empties, you visually sense the difference in weight or volume and your kinesthetic awareness modifies your level of flex, stretch and grasp.

Here's the set up for the strategic metaphor....

In front of you are two seemingly similar objects. One is a basketball; the other is an eight pound exercise ball. No marking indicates the difference and perceptually you do not see any difference. Your response to picking up, tossing and moving the basketball are pre-conditioned and your use of kinesthesis provides you with the correct response or positioning of your body to lift move and toss the ball. Immediately you reach for the eight pound exercise ball. As soon as more resistance or mass is detected-a difference is perceived- by the brain a series of adjustments in movement, muscles and positioning are instantaneously and impulsively triggered and you are able to lift and balance the eight pound ball.

Amazing stuff….neuropathways firing, receptors alerting, muscles responding, firing more receptors and neuroresponses, and memory….memory now manages to be stored with a “caution objects are heavier than they appear” flag. The very next time you see two basketballs together you will process the information to be sure that you do not in fact have one basketball and one exercise ball. You have been reconditioned in a matter of seconds.

So let’s apply this pattern to strategic planning and my current favorite key term, positioning.

Positioning- or the place a brand occupies in the consumers mind relative to the competition -is an active and passive strategic planning process. In the passive sense we rely on the experiences (conditioned responses) of the consumer to continue to position our product and react to our product as they always have, creating a brand loyalty. In the active sense, we must be critically aware and consistently analyze if that position is really where we want to be, and if not, create a set of strategic and tactical maneuvers to position our offerings where we desire them to be.

Reflect on the concept of butterball.

Not the chubby fourth grader who ends up walking the mile during Phys Ed.

Butterball with a capital B.

Oh, the turkey. Yeah, you got it. Trimmings, Gramma's kitchen, Grandpa’s tobacco, chestnuts scooted to the side of your plate, a few slices of pie too many, falling asleep to John Madden’s voice….your brain is firing away at your experiences with Butterball. Indeed, it might be that your family enjoys ham for Thanksgiving, but Butterball made you think of Thanksgiving. Why? That is the positioning in your mind that thanks to years of marketing communication and years of stored personal experiences have secured Butterball a cozy spot on the couch next to you and your Thanksgiving holiday tradition.

So what if Butterball would rather you think of turkey as say Sunday supper? Butterball strategizes, “maybe we should not just be about Thanksgiving. Maybe we should be about family time together. Maybe people can have turkey dinner with the trimmings every week.”

Yumm….Obvious increase in sales for Butterball, and well, turkey is actually low in fat, tasty and not a budget breaker for the consumer. Butterball is fully aware of the original position in the consumer's mind-just like basketball-it has a specific set of experiences and concepts all interconnected in the brain. However, Butterball seeks to change the conditioned response-Thanksgiving- and "move" the perception of its brand to a weekly family dinner occasion, thus repositioning its brand, or reconditioning their consumers. Butterball hopes that a few well placed, well timed, well targeted messages will have the same effect as the eight pound exercise ball...a new flag signals an adjustment in consumer's mind.

It becomes Butterball’s responsibility to adjust the position in your mind-your brand kinesthesia. How can they do that? Well, they must first identify or analyze where Butterball is in awareness and set of experiences-much like the basketball-a conditioned response. They must determine and analyze where they really want to be. This is a mini-brand audit...aspired identity, communicated identity and image all pulled together and synthesized. Finally Butterball arrives at a strategic plan to change the consumer response- brand kinesthesia. They are tasked with communicating Butterball as something different-much like the exercise ball-so that responses change and families use a weekly family dinner as turkey day.

Analysis-Synthesis-Kinesthesis.

A process for strategic positioning which in turn provides reinforcement- a flag- to organizations and consumers that things are as they both desire/perceive them to be. If you aren’t convinced that strategic positioning is a must for your organization, then let me know how that three pointer from the top of the arc with an exercise ball works for you.

If you want to learn more about your positioning, just ASK.

DC

DC is the name affectionately given to Debbie Coleman as she lamented to her students on the credibility of the brand name Debbie. DC is/has served as an adjunct faculty member in Marketing and Branding Management and currently offers her strategic insight to those in need of a fresh perspective. You can email her at dcolemanaskcommunications@gmail.com

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D. Coleman
AskCommunications
www.ask-communications.com