国际贸易、市场营销类课题外文翻译——市场定位策略(Positioning_in_Practice)

1、国际贸易、市场营销类课题外文翻译市场定位策略(Positioning_in_Practice) PositioninginPractice PositioninginPractice PPoossiittiioonniinnggiinnPPrraaccttiiccee StrategicRoleofMarketing For large firms that have two or more strategic business units SBUs , there are generally three levels of strategy: corporate-level strategy

2、, strategic-business-unit-level or business-level strategy, and marketing strategy. A corporate strategy provides direction on the company's mission, the kinds of businesses it should be in, and its growth policies. A business-level strategy addresses the way a strategic business unit will compe

3、te within its industry. Finally, a marketing strategy provides a plan for pursuing the company's objectives within a specific market segment. Note that the higher level of strategy provides both the objectivesand guidelines forthelower level ofstrategy. At corporate level, management must coordi

4、nate the activities of multiple strategic business units. Thus the decisions about the organization's scope and appropriate resource deployments/allocation across its various divisions or businesses are the primary focus of corporate strategy.Attempts to develop and maintain distinctive competen

5、cies tend to focus on generating superior financial, capital, and human resources; designing effective organizational structures and processes; and seeking synergy among thefirm's variousbusinesses. At business-level strategy, managers focus on how the SBU will compete within its industry. A maj

6、or issue addressed in business strategy is how to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage. Synergy for the unit is sought across product-marketsand acrossfunctional department within the unit. The primary purpose of a marketing strategy is to effectively allocate and coordinate marketing resourc

7、es and activities to accomplish the firm's objectives within a specific product-market. The decisions about the scope of a marketing strategy involve specifying the target market segment s to pursue and the breadth of the product line to offered. At this level of strategy, firms seek competitive

8、 advantage and synergy through a well-integrated program of marketing mix elements tailored tothe needsand wantsofcustomers in the targetsegment s . StrategicRoleofPositioning Based on the above discussion, it is clear that marketing strategy consists of two parts: target market strategy and marketi

9、ng mix strategy. Target market strategy consists of three processes: market segmentation, targeting or target market selection , and positioning. Marketing mix strategy refers to the process of creating a unique blend of product, distribution, promotion, and pricing strategies the four Ps designed t

10、o satisfying the needs and wants of customers. Target market strategy and marketing mix strategy are closely linked and have a strong interdependence. The position of a product identified from the target market strategy serves as a guideline forformulating marketing mix strategy. Market segmentation

11、 is the process by which a market is divided into distinct customer subsets of people with similar needs and characteristics that lead them to respond in similar ways to a particular product offerings and strategic marketing programs.Targeting or target market selection is the process of selecting a

12、 segment or segments to serve by evaluating the relative attractiveness of each segment, the benefit sought, and the firm's relative business strengths.Finally, positioning is the process of designing product offerings and developing strategic marketing programs which collectively createan endur

13、ing competitive advantagein the targetmarket. The concept of target market strategy especially positioning is well-known and widely accepted by most marketing practitioners especially consumer goods managers as useful Atheoretical concepts in formulating marketing mix strategy. In practice, however,

14、 marketers tend to bypass formal positioning and go directly to formulate marketing mix strategy. This may be due to the fact that these managers do not know howto obtain perceptual maps, which aremaps that showthe positions of productson aset ofprimary customerneeds. The objective of this paper is

15、to demonstrate a practical way for marketing practitioners to obtain perceptual maps for positioning and marketing mix strategy formulation. Specifically, perceptual mapping and its relation to positioning are first discussed. This is followed by discussion of statistical techniques that can be used

16、 to create perceptual maps. Finally, a example of positioning process by factor analysis is demonstrated. PerceptualMapping: IdentificationofStrategic Benefits Positioning is the perceived fit between a particular product and the needs of the target market, and thus positioning concept must be defin

17、ed relative to the customers needs and competitive offerings. It is one of the most important strategic concepts because it is concerned with differentiation. Positioning reflect the careful efforts of marketing firms to portray the benefits they offer customers and to differentiate themselves from

18、competition. Positioning is critical for a product s success. Not only must the product deliver the benefits the customer needs, but it must do so better than competition. Effective positioning requires assessing the positions occupied by competing products, determining the important dimensions unde

19、rlying these positions, and choosing aposition in the market where the organizationsmarketing effortswill have the greatest impact. An essential tool for strategic benefit positioning is perceptual maps. Customer Needsand Perceptual Mapping:Method and Procedures Perceptual maps represent the positio

20、ns of products on a set of primary customer needs. Perceptual maps visually summarized the dimensions that customers use to perceive and judge products and identify how competitive products are placed on those dimensions. In practice, marketers need to know the number of dimensions, the names of tho

21、se dimensions, what more detailed customer needs make up the dimensions, where competition is positioned, and where the ideal position for a new productorforrepositioning is. A set of useful consumer behavior model has been developed to handle consumer attitudes toward various brands in a marketplac

22、e. Hauser and Urban 1977 , in a new-product setting, describe the processing of product attributes as compression into smaller number of aggregate dimensions called Aevaluation criteria. The central idea is that the brands in a market can be represented as a set of points in a multidimensional space

23、. The axes of this space represent the perceived attributes that characterize the stimuli. Two main analytical approaches most frequently used to derive evaluation criteria and build perceptual maps are decompositional methods, based on multidimensional scaling, and compositional methods, based on f

24、actor analysis Lilien and Kotler 1983 . Each of these procedures is discussed in the following section. Multidimensional Scaling MDS Multidimensional scaling MDS is a set of procedures in which a reduced space of product alternatives reflects perceived similarities and dissimilarities between produc

25、tsby the inter-productdistances. mensional scaling tocreateperceptualmaps: 1.Have customers evaluate existing products according to their relative similarity and form an average proximity matrix whose entries represent the similarities or dissimilaritiesamongthe productsforeach groupofcustomersyou w

26、ish toanalyze. 2.Usemultidimensional scaling to produceamap in 2,3,.dimensions. 3.Based on managerial judgments, limitations owing to the number of stimuli, and aplot ofAstressselect theappropriatenumber ofdimensions. 4. Name the dimensions based on the relative position of the stimuli or a regressi

27、on ofthe map coordinateson attributeratings. Multidimensional scaling is a powerful technique, but it must be used with caution. Several issues need to be considered. The first issue is concerned with the number of stimuli i.e., products needed. Klabir 1969 shows that at least eight products are nee

28、ded to create a good two-dimensional map. Green and Wind 1973 suggest that the number of dimensions should be less than one-third of the number of products. The second issue is concerned with the naming of the dimensions. The analyst generally names the dimensions by using knowledge of the product c

29、ategory to explain best the products positions. This procedure is arbitrary and involves a high degree of creativity. The final issue is concerned with the number of dimensions. There is little theory to guide the selection of the number of dimensions. However, the stress measure obtained from MDS c

30、an be plotted against the number of dimensions todetermine when marginal changesin stressarebecoming small. Widely used, user-friendly statistical packages such as SAS and SPSS contain the programs for multidimensional scaling. For example, in SPSS, one can obtain a multidimensional scaling analysis

31、 from the statistics menu by choosing scale and then multidimensionalscaling. FactorAnalysis Factor analysis was originally developed in connection with efforts to identify the major factors making up human intelligence. Educational and psychological researchers did not believe that every test in an

32、 educational battery measured a different facet of intelligence. In fact, test scores for certain pairs of tests were highly inter correlated, indicating that a morebasic mental ability underlies test performance. Factor analysis was developed to explain these intercorrelations in the test results o

33、f a few basic intelligence factors, subsequently identified as verbal ability, quantitative ability, and spatial ability. Since that time, factor analysis has been applied to many other problems and is a frequently used technique in performing product-evaluation analyses in marketing. The basic fact

34、or-analysis model assumes that original perceptual ratings about a product are generated by a small number of latent variables, or factors, and that the variance observed in each original perceptual variable is accounted for partly by a set of common factors and partly by a factor specific to that v

35、ariable. In the construction of a perceptual map by factor analysis, the positions of the products/brands studied can be obtained by averaging the factor scores of the respondents for each product/brand. Factor scores are calculated from the matrix of factor-score coefficients,which describesfactors

36、coresasalinear functionofthe original ratings. Tousefactoranalysis tocreateperceptualmap: 1. Have consumers rate all the products/brands under studied, one at a time, on a set of product attributes. You can use Likert scales scales anchored with strongly agree and strongly disagree or semantic diffe

37、rential scales scales with bipolar adjectives in your questionnaire. 2. Analyze the data by factor analysis with rotation e.g., with vari rotation . Also request forfactorscoresforall the products/brands. 3.Averagethefactorscoresoverall therespondentsforeach product/brand. 4. Use the average factor

38、scores for each product/brand as coordinates to plot the position on the perceptual space. Normally, two-dimensional maps are meaningful and easy to understand. If more than two factors are extracted/identified from the set ofproductattributes,morethan one two-dimensional mapsmay be generated. 5. Us

39、e factor loading table, which is an output representing the correlations between the attribute scales and the factors that the computer algorithm identified, to name thefactors. 6. Theideal line representing the relative importance of the factor scores in determining attitude toward the brand can be

40、 identified from the multiple regression function with attitude as the dependent variable and factor scores as the independent variables. Factor analysis is a very powerful and useful technique for producing perceptual maps. Therearealso many softwarefor PCthat contains this statistical technique e.

41、g., SPSS,SAS, BMDP . In this session, we briefly went through the concepts of target market strategy which consists of market segmentation, targeting, and positioning , strategic brand management, and positioning research. Then we went through the concept and the stepsin thedataanalysis forpositioni

42、ng research. TargetMarket Strategy Target market strategy is the process of identifying one or more target markets and its or their unique positioning s . Target market strategy consists of 1 market segmentation, 2 targeting, and 3 positioning. Market Segmentation. Market segmentation is the process

43、 of segmenting a heterogeneous potential market into a few or several homogeneous segments. In other words, customers in a potential market may have different preferences. As such, it is not effective and efficient to teach all of them by one product and one plan. To be effective and efficient, a ma

44、nager needs to group the potential customers into group according to their unique preferences and serves one or more of these groups according to the company's strength. The other way to look at market segmentation is that it is the process to test if the potential market is homogeneous in terms

45、 of preferences. Good market segmentation should result in segments with the following characteristics: 1 substantiality i.e., each segment is large enough , 2 profilability/identifiability/measurability i.e., each segment can be described in terms of demographic or psychographic characteristics , 3

46、 accessibility i.e., the media consumption and shopping behavior can be identified , and 4 differential responsiveness i.e.,each segment has aunique preference . Targeting. Targeting or target market selection is the process of selecting one or more segments to be the target market or target markets

47、. The segment s is are chosen by matching the strengths/ability of the company to serve the segment with the profit potential in each segment. GE Matrix market attractiveness versus business position is a good tool for targeting.There are four targeting strategies that you can use: 1 concentrated or

48、 focused targeting strategy i.e., selecting one large segment to be your target market , 2 multi-segment or differentiated targeting strategy i.e., selecting two or more large segments to be your target markets with a unique positioning for each of them , 3 mass targeting strategy i.e., selecting tw

49、o or more or all segments to be your target market with only one positioning for all of them , and 4 niche targeting strategy i.e., selecting one small market to be your target market . Positioning. Positioning has two meanings. First, positioning is the most important benefit or benefits desired by

50、 the customers in a particular target market. Second, positioning is the process of creating brand image in terms of benefit or benefits in the customer's mind through marketing mix strategy the 4Ps . The brand image must reflect the most important benefit s that the target customers want. To po

51、sition your brand in a target market, you first conduct positioning research to createaperceptualmap ofcompeting brands in thetarget Thefollowing noteisprovided by Prof.PowpakaSamart What IsMarketing? STRATEGICMARKETING As you may already know, the main objective of any business is to make profit. O

52、n the other hand, there arealso non-profit or not-for-profit organizations that exist in the society. Their main objective is to achieve a non-profit objective or to serve a certain cause, e.g., HK Red Cross wants to obtain enough blood to help the patients. Thesenon-profit organizations still need

53、to makemoney or obtain money. But they do not do it forprofit; they do it in orderto secure enoughresources to help them achieve their non-profit objectives. To achieve their objectives, businesses and non-profit organizations need to have different people to perform different functions. They normal

54、ly organize people who perform the same function into the same "departments". Accounting, finance, production, R&D, logistics, marketing, and sales are examples of departments that normally exist in abusiness organization. "What is marketing?" Using American Marketing Associa

55、tion's 1985 definition, marketing is "the process of planning and execution of the conception, pricing, distribution, and promotion of goods, services, and ideas to create or facilitate exchanges that satisfy both individual and organizational objectives." Based on the definition, it is quite clear that the definition is inclined toward marketing as a business function or what marketing people do . In essence, the function of marketing is about identifying the right target market a group