As gaining shelf space becomes more competitive for brand awareness, marketers should be looking into leveraging one of the various types of product positioning strategies.

A long-time staple of in-store marketing, product positioning strategies are tied to how products (and product features) are displayed in the shopping aisle to maximize sales and meet customer needs. Unfortunately, CPG brands may find they have little control over their placement in the store without a hefty investment or a unique value proposition. Mobile marketing offers a path to cost-effectively enhancing in-store placement.

There are three standard types of product positioning strategies brands should consider with both existing and new products: comparative, differentiation, and segmentation. Through these strategies, brands can help their product stand out by targeting the ideal customer with the best marketing effort, and brand identity message. Mobile marketing enhances all of these strategies and helps guide the target audience to products in the shopping aisle.

3 Traditional Types of Product Positioning Strategies

Conventional models of product positioning strategies center on catching the eye of consumers. While there is a wide range of options for brands to consider in product positioning, most can be broken down into one of three categories.

  • Comparative: Comparative positioning strategies work by placing similar products right next to other brands to highlight their competitive edge. A typical example of this occurs when stores place a white label value brand next to a more expensive name brand product. Often, the label includes a “compare to X brand” statement to show the consumers that the products are similar in their core values, but the value brand offers a better price point and therefore has a competitive advantage in consumers’ minds.
  • Differentiation: Sometimes, the uniqueness of a product can’t be duplicated, making it ideal for a differentiation strategy. An excellent example of a product easily differentiated is Barilla’s Pronto pasta. While the pasta aisle is competitive, Pronto offers a unique selling point (USP) in that it requires no draining. As such, this unique feature is the primary product positioning statement that the brand’s product highlights on its packaging to gain consumer attention and cement its market position.
  • Segmentation: Sometimes, helping change the perception of your product and the product value overall requires focusing on multiple audiences with different needs, but with the same product. Consider a simple product like Bayer aspirin and their customer base. The brand offers bottles of its tablets in the pharmacy aisle at the grocery store, but they also provide smaller, on-the-go packs for purchase at the convenience store to leverage a different target market. Through this brand positioning, they target consumers buying bottles of medication for their households for use in the future, as well as product marketing towards travelers or individuals dealing with an immediate ache or pain they want to take care of right away.

Even strong brands may struggle with obtaining optimal shelf space to leverage these types of product positioning strategies. In some cases, they may rely on high-quality packaging and brand messaging to help draw the eye of target customers. However, mobile marketing can offer brands opportunities to differentiate their products in the shopping aisle without the need to update labels and taglines – also providing the brand with more detailed audience metrics and insight.

Updating Traditional Product Positioning Strategies With Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing can be used to guide potential customers to products in the aisle even when shelf space is not optimal. These strategies work well in conjunction with rewards programs where consumers receive points for seeking out and interacting with participating items. When leveraged through an in-store mobile app, these programs:

  • Incentivize interaction for comparative positioning: Brands that don’t wish to rely on discounts or price-based positioning to compete with value brands often look to rewards programs as a way to provide value without cutting prices. Customer feedback indicates consumers often view rewards points as having a higher value than their simple face amount as rewards points are earned. Apps which provide a way for consumers to receive rewards points for scanning UPCs or receipts can be an excellent way to help products stand out, improve conversions and retention, even against lower-cost competitors.
  • Leverage mobile video to differentiate products: Barilla partnered with Shopkick to gain attention for their new Pronto pasta product. Shopkick provided the brand with a platform to share a mobile video announcing its unique selling point: convenience.  Consumers received kicks (aka rewards points) for viewing the mobile video which helped them to remember the product when they went to the store. Overall, as a brand positioning strategy, it was a success, with 50% of viewers of the video choosing to purchase the product. These promising results are why many brands choose to contact Shopkick to enhance in-store marketing and pricing strategy.
  • Offer data-driven personalization for segmentation: Mobile apps provide a unique opportunity to cater to consumers by location demographic, which creates an automatic kind of personalization brands can leverage to enhance sales in a specific area. These programs work off GPS, beacons, and other devices that push notifications to consumers when they enter a location.

Brands have many opportunities to enhance in-store marketing with mobile apps. These programs drive in-the-moment product recognition which can be used to introduce new offerings or stimulate interest in old ones. Pairing them with standard product positioning strategies only improves the results.

Traditional product positioning strategies can gain a significant boost from mobile marketing and the additional user experience that comes with it. By using incentives, engaging content, and location-enabled messages, brands reach consumers when they’re about to make purchase decisions. The primary goal and key benefit of successful product positioning is to increase sales by boosting visibility and Shopkick enables this without requiring optimal shelf placement.

Shopkick improves our partner’s sales in the store by using mobile marketing to enhance the traditional types of effective product positioning strategies.