Positioning and Communications
In marketing, positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for their product, brand, or organization. It is the 'relative competitive comparison' their product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market.

Generally, the product positioning process involves:

  • Defining the market in which the product or brand will compete.
  • Identifying the attributes that define the product 'space'.
  • Collecting customer information about their product perceptions on relevant attributes.
  • Determining each product's share of mind.
  • Determining each product's current location in the product space.
  • Determining the target market's preferred combination of attributes.

Strategic Communication can mean either communicating a concept, a process, or data that satisfies a long term strategic goal of an organization by allowing facilitation of advanced planning, or communicating over long distances - usually using international telecommunications or dedicated global network assets to coordinate actions and activities of operationally significant commercial, non-commercial and military business or combat and logistic subunits.

Multivariate Solutions is a leader in Brand Positioning and Strategic Communications research, with products that address the key issues of brand positioning and broadcast our clients’ key message combining intuitions, statistics, experience, and savvy.

Positioning and Communications Articles
Twitter Network Analysis: Nordstrom at the Center of Resistance?, published in Greenbook, examines how visualization of social networks is now coming online to make sense of Big Data and convey the results of analyses through emerging, open-source programs.
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Michael Lieberman’s Quirk’s Marketing Research Review article, Using NodeXL to Visualize Social Media, demonstrates how to leverage social networks for promotion using the NodeXL open-source Excel add-on tool.

Corporate Image Chart is a graphic display of two-levels of regression which show Brand Images and Brand Drivers.

Regression Analysis Positioning uses the most common predictive analytic method to distinguish between two types of customer and maximizes how to communicate to each.

A Choice Model maximizing advertising effect is shown in Using Conjoint Analysis in Political Communications. This analysis, when used properly, can provide insight to the governor when he sets policy priorities or assesses main concerns dominating the voter’s mind as the election nears, or it can gauge the strength of the position ‘soup’ a given campaign will stir when it goes to press.

What’s in a Name? It all starts with a name. Just as each of us has a name at the core of our individual sense of identity, so brands have names as the basis of their visual and verbal identities. Specific methodology tests and validates naming choices.

Design Performance – The Kano Model, published in Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, offers insight into product attributes perceived to be important to customers. The purpose of the tool is to support product specification and discussion through better development team understanding on differentiating product features, as opposed to focusing initially on customer needs, then forming strategic communications to meet those needs.