Positioning Products Across Multiple Markets

Working Smarter reader Elhamy Kamel left an interesting comment on last Friday’s entry about being able to see your product through the eyes of your customers:

I do not know if the traditional positioning matrix can solve today's confusing markets, statements like think global and act local sounds like someone wants to be everything to everyone.

With the advent of globalization, organizations are blurring their traditional boundaries, to fit into a business model "I am everything to everyone."

Do you have a positioning matrix that can handle these new confusing market positioning?

Elhamy raises a good point – when it comes to businesses who offer multiple products in different regional markets one positioning matrix simply cannot account for all of the factors that differentiate all of the competitors in those markets.

If your company competes in multiple markets and if those markets all have different competitors then you are going to need positioning matrices for each market. If the competition changes then the positioning matrices must change.

Rather than try to use one large positioning matrix to factor in all of the complexities that come with competing in multiple international markets I recommend creating positioning matrices for each product that your company offers.

An Example: Procter & Gamble’s Laundry Detergent Lines

A good example of a complex, multi-product/multi-market offering is Procter and Gamble’s laundry detergent line. Here are all of the laundry detergent brands offered by P&G:

• Cheer™
• Tide™
• Dreft™
• Gain™

These four brand names are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to P&G’s detergents; each brand contains several products. I’m not going to list all of them, but let’s just say that P&G’s offers a large variety of laundry detergent products.

Example: Procter & Gamble in American Laundry Detergent Markets

Let’s take a look at how P&G might position its own brands against each other in a single American detergent market. A good market to observe might be middle class homeowners with children over the age of six years old. Let’s suppose that there are two major factors that divide up this market for laundry detergents:

• The color of the fabrics that the detergents treat: colored fabrics or white fabrics; and
• The impact of the detergent’s cleansing ability – do homeowners want something that does a good job removing stains and odors while producing fabric that feels soft and fresh or do they want something that is really tough on stains and dirt at the expense of being hard on the fabric?

Here’s what a positioning matrix for some of P&G’s detergent products might look like:

P&G’s detergents with bleach are used to treat white fabrics whereas Cheer (P&G’s specialty detergent for colors) and Gain without bleach are more suitable for regular, colored fabrics. Gain is P&G’s detergent designed to add freshness and bounce to the fabrics, whereas Tide and Cheer are designed to be more potent cleansers thus they are harder on the fabrics.

But how would this positioning matrix change for American middle-class homeowners with children under the age of six?

The competitive picture of this market is totally different because the factors that influence consumer purchasing decisions are different – when consumers have young children they want their children’s clothes to be especially soft and free from chemical odors (perfumes.) This is why P&G has built a special detergent, Dreft™, specifically for this purpose.

So what does the competition look like for detergent for families with young children? Here’s what it might look like:

The competitive landscape for laundry detergent for American homeowners with children under six is obviously different from the competitive landscape for homeowners with older children due to the different consumer influence factors. Different factors, different competitors, different markets, and thus we must have different positioning matrices.

The Lesson Here

What this shows you is that it’s vitally important to accurately define your target market before you attempt to determine your company’s and your product’s positioning within a given market. In a sense, you do have to think globally and act locally, simply because there factors that influence consumer behavior and the competitors change at the local level.

Positioning matrices are a great tool for clarifying market position, but different competitors require you to draw different positioning matrices for those markets.

Positioning for broad, confusing markets is difficult simply because there are too many factors to represent on a single matrix – a better practice is to create new positioning matrices when the competition is different in any market that your company has entered.