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Competitive Positioning

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Determining your department and your store’s competitive position in the marketplace is essential for long term profitability. Understanding your competitive position will enable you to develop a competitive strategy, which will help guide all of your marketing decisions.

What is Competitive Positioning?

Competitive positioning is simply determining what customer desire you can fulfill better than your competition that will make customers want to shop in your department and your store.

Your Value Proposition

There are three main types of value that a business can focus on. It can focus on delivering the lowest price, the best product, or the best customer service.

While stores and departments within stores may undertake many marketing strategies, each strategy generally falls under one of those three value propositions. For example:

  • Buy one get one free promotion – lowest price value proposition
  • Special promotion of Triple A aged steaks – best product value proposition
  • In-store butcher shop – best customer service value proposition

Understanding your store’s competitive position in the marketplace will help determine which marketing strategies should be the focus of your resources.

Determining Your Competitive Positioning

Determining your store and your department’s ideal competitive position requires two areas of research – customer research, and competition research.

Research can be as in-depth as hiring research firms to carry out surveys and focus groups, or it can be as simple as talking to customers and other local residents and visiting other stores to see how they operate.

Customer Research

There are two essential pieces of information you must know about your customers and potential customers:

  1. Who are they?
  2. What do they like/dislike about shopping for groceries and meat?

Determining who your customers are (the area from which you will draw your customers) will help make sure that you’re asking the right people for the opinions that will help you decide on your competitive position.

Finding out their likes/dislikes will help you determine which value proposition is the most important to the majority of the people in your customer area.

Competition Research

Who else in your customer area is offering the same products that you offer? What value proposition (low price, best products, best customer service) have they positioned themselves in? What are they doing well? What are they doing poorly? And most importantly, what can you do better that will draw customers into your store and department instead of theirs?

Choose Your Competitive Position

Determining your customers’ desires, your competitor’s weaknesses, and what you can do better, should clarify the best competitive position for you to take – lowest price, best products, or best customer service.

Now you’re ready to plan the strategies that will keep you profitable.

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