Market Positioning

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Research Report: Delivering Insights

23 ratings

University of California, Davis

Research Report: Delivering Insights

23 ratings

Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Market Research

You have completed all the hard work of conducting your internal, secondary, and primary research. You have analyzed all the data and are able to formulate insights and recommendations based on your research proposal. But what is the best way to present your findings and be able to make a decision? In this course, you will discuss how to incorporate a story in your marketing presentation to help you capture the attention and gain support of stakeholders and business leaders. You will choose the most effective analytical method for delivering your insights and the best presentation method for your given audience. You will incorporate data visualization best practices and use tips and tricks when presenting to your various levels of decision makers and stakeholders.

From the lesson

Getting Started & Synthesizing Findings and Deriving Insights

You’ve gathered your data from qualitative and quantitative market research. Where do you go from there? At this stage, you will need to synthesize your findings and derive valid and actionable insights that will help to solve the business problem. In this module, you will be able to find the story in the data and shape it to contribute to a compelling market research presentation. You will be able to synthesize the data, select the appropriate tools to analyze your product or service and determine how consumers view your market. You'll be able to evaluate Market Positioning and Market Segmentation; you will see how to use Conjoint Analysis to compare the relative value of product features or attributes, and Perceptual Maps to help tell the story of consumers in your market and provide actionable comparisons. You will also define terminology and essential concepts that will equip you to be conversant and more confident in the market research field.

Synthesizing Findings and Deriving Insights Introduction1:03

Finding the Story in Your Research7:06

Market Positioning4:59

Using Perceptual Maps8:09

Market Segmentation5:25

Segmentation: Variations and Benefits5:47

Conjoint Analysis2:27

Performing Conjoint Analysis10:12

Meet the Instructors

Robin Boyar
Founder, thinktank research & strategy
UC Davis Division of Continuing and Professional Education
Ashwin Aravindakshan, PhD
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Management
UC Davis

Let's say you're selling a brand of laundry detergent,

you probably want to know how consumers view

your product compared to competitors in the marketplace.

Do consumers see your detergent as a high quality product or a low quality product?

Do they view it as having high efficacy or low efficacy?

Do they think that it has a better or worse scent than your competitor?

By the end of this lesson,

you'll be able to discuss the importance of defining from the consumer's point of view,

have your product or service compares with competitors within

your market and methods that help you decide which attributes you should focus on.

Let's begin with a discussion of positioning.

It's important to know how current and potential

customers think of your product because it allows you to place

a product with respect to the competing products

and this placement is really of course in the mind of the consumer.

We call this method positioning.

The key questions positioning answers is,

how does your product compare to your competitors?

And how do you identify opportunities in a product market?

Also, how do consumers view your product?

A common technique used to try and answer these questions is called a perceptual map.

If we get past the jargon a little bit,

perceptual map is really just a visualization of

how consumers perceive a set of brands in a particular category.

And that set of brands can include your brands or brand and a set of

competitors brands that you think are closely related to your brand.

So to provide you some insight on how you might approach this problem,

let's look at an example.

Let's say you were working for a variable technology business and you would

like to identify some space of opportunity in this business.

It might help you to understand how consumers actually use wearable technology and how

they perceive the set of

wearable technology alternatives that currently exist in the marketplace.

Let's say that you're looking at wearable technology in the form of smartwatches.

Now you would need to identify the space of

competing wearable technology in the smartwatch space.

For example, you might think that Apple watch would be a good competitor,

you might think of Samsung watches,

you might think about Fitbit's efforts in this space and so on.

Now the question becomes,

if you already have a product in this space,

how do consumers view your product as compared

to these other alternatives that exist in the marketplace?

The common method of course is to survey

customers on the attributes of the product and to get their ratings.

You would want to get that for your brand or product concept

as well as for the competing brands that exist in the marketplace.

Once you obtain the overall performance of the products surveyed,

you are then in a better position to answer the question of how

your product compares to other competitors in the marketplace.

Commonly, one would consider about 15-20 attributes in about 5-10 brands for analysis,

that's the most common approach when using this method.

While we won't actually get into the analytical processes

used or the methodology used to try and derive insights from the sort of data,

I do want to define it.

The methodology is called Factor Analysis.

Very briefly, factor analysis creates composites of several

of the attributes we looked at and combines them into two or three composite factors.

Now, the rule of thumb used to try and

understand how many factors one should keep depends on

a graph called Scree Plot which charts

the Eigenvalue associated with the various factors.

Factors with eigenvalues greater than one are kept in the analysis.

Unfortunately, we would not have enough time

to go deeper into how eigenvalues are calculated.

However, I have provided some useful links that discuss

eigenvalues in some detail and provide the necessary intuition.

Once you identify how many factors you want to keep,

each of these factors need to be named and apart from that,

you can add to analysis of performing

a preference regression to try and

understand which of these factors are actually important.

Let us assume that you performed your analysis and obtain the results.

Let's say that you have determine the number of

factors from the scree plot and preference regression,

and the question now becomes,

how do you tell your story?

The key point here is that the results from such analysis should allow you to

identify the most important factors and

create what we started off wanting to create which is a perceptual map.

In our next lesson,

we are going to take a look at

a real world example so that we can get a better sense of how

perceptual maps and positioning help us

understand our market and help us continue to build our story.

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