Social Marketing

Crafting a Desired Positioning

Nancy R. Lee
Philip Kotler
 Positioning Defined
Positioning is the act of designing the organization’s actual and perceived
offering in such a way that it lands on and occupies a distinctive place in the
mind of the priority audience—where you want it to be. Keep in mind that
your offering, which you will design in the next three chapters, includes your
product, its price, and how it is accessed—place. The desired positioning for
this offer is then supported by promotional components including messages,
messengers, creative elements, and communication channels.
There is a good reason we present and recommend you take this step after
you have selected and researched your priority audience and before you
develop your marketing intervention mix strategy. Since offers are
positioned differently for different audiences (e.g., exercise for tweens
versus seniors), choosing an audience comes first. And since your product,
price, place, and promotion will determine (to a great extent) where you land,
it makes sense to know your desired destination. This will help guide your
marketing strategy by clarifying the brand’s essence, what goals it helps the
consumer achieve, and how it does so in a unique way.
Positioning in the Commercial Sector vs Social Marketing
 Develop Positioning Statement

Positioning principles and processes for social marketing are similar to those of commercial
marketing. With the profile of your priority audience in mind, including any unique
demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavior-related characteristics and the
findings from your research on perceived barriers, benefits, motivators, competitors, and
influential others, you will now “simply” craft a positioning statement.
Inspiration for your descriptive phrase will come from the lists of barriers, benefits, and
motivators identified in your research. As you may recall, the ideal research will have
included a prioritization of barriers and benefits, giving you a sense of what factors would be
most important to highlight. You are searching for the “higher value,” the key benefits to be
gained or costs that will be avoided by adopting the desired behavior.

To leverage prior steps in the planning model, you may find it advantageous to consider a
focus for your positioning statements, choosing from among those that drive home specific
behaviors, highlight benefits, overcome barriers, upstage the competition, or reposition an
“old brand.”
 Behavior-Focused Positioning

For some social marketing programs, especially those with a new and/or very specific desired
behavior in mind, you may benefit from a behavior-focused positioning. In these cases, a
description of your behavior will be highlighted.
Making sure priority audiences know the specifics of the desired behavior is key to
successful outcome.
 Barriers-Focused Positioning

With this type of focus, you want your offer’s positioning to help overcome or at least
minimize perceived barriers, such as concern about self-efficacy, fear, or perceived high costs
associated with performing the behavior. Example: Organ donation,
 Benefits-Focused Positioning

For benefit-focused positioning, the focus is once more on benefits your target audience
wants and believes they can get.
 Competition-Focused Positioning

Because consumers typically choose goods

and services that give them the greatest
value, marketers work to position their
brands on the key benefits that they offer
relative to competing brands
In 2003, New York City announced a
convenient and cost-saving alternative to
dialing 911—dialing 311 instead. With a vast
majority of the more than 8 million annual
calls to 911 representing nonemergency
situations, the service was anticipated to
delight citizens and decrease operating
costs. All calls are answered by a live
operator, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
and can be translated into 170 languages
 Competition-Focused Positioning

A benefit-to-benefit superiority tactic appeals to values higher than those perceived for
the competition (e.g., a child who wants and needs a parent is compared to the short-
term pleasures of smoking).
A cost-to-benefit superiority tactic focuses on decreasing costs of or barriers to adopting
the desired behavior and, at the same time, decreasing perceived benefits of the
competition (e.g., success stories from cessation classes include a testimonial from a
spouse about how nice it is to have clean air in the house).
A benefit-to-cost superiority tactic emphasizes the benefits of the desired behavior and
the costs of the competing behavior(s) (e.g., abilities of teen athletes who don’t smoke
as compared to those of teen athletes who do).
A cost-to-cost superiority tactic relies on a favorable comparison of costs of the desired
behavior relative to those of the competition (e.g., short-term nicotine withdrawal
symptoms are compared with living with emphysema).
 Repositioning
What happens when your program has a current positioning
that you feel is in the way of your achieving your behavior
change goals? Several factors may have contributed to this
wake-up call and the sense that you need to “relocate.
For Example: You may be suffering from an image problem.
When bike helmets were first promoted to youth, they
balked. Making the behavior “fun, easy, and popular” for the
audience is Bill Smith’s recommendation and could well
describe the strategy in Figure . These three words focus
program managers on how to change behavior by giving people
what they want along with what we feel they need.
Fun in this context means to provide your audience with
perceived benefits they care about.
Easy means to remove all possible barriers to action and
make the behavior as simple and accessible as possible.
Popular means to help the audience feel that this is
something others are doing, particularly others the audience
believes are important to them
 How Positioning Relates to Branding

Brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, and/or design that identifies the maker or seller of a
product. Brand identity is how you (the maker) want your priority audience to think, feel, and
act with respect to your brand. Brand image is how your priority audience actually ends up
thinking, feeling, and acting relative to your brand. Branding is the process of developing an
intended brand identity
Your positioning statement is something you and others can count on to provide parameters
and inspiration for developing your desired brand identity—how you want the desired behavior
to be seen by the priority audience. It will provide strong and steady guidance for your
decision making regarding your marketing intervention mix, as it is the 4Ps that will determine
where your offer lands in the minds of your priority audience. And when your brand image
doesn’t align with your desired positioning (brand identity), you’ll look to your 4Ps for “help” in
repositioning the brand.