Consumer Culture Positioning, High-Tech and High-Touch Product Positioning - Assignment Example

Examine what is consumer culture positioning? What other strategic positioning choices do global marketers have? Culture is a dynamic and ever evolving concept that consists of a vast body of rituals, norms and traditions that are based on mutually accepted and widely shared perceptions among members of a society. Culture, in a sense, identifies a society and gives it a distinct flavour and personality. Large corporations that do business across continents and cultures must be wide awake to the highly unwelcome possibilities that might arise due to translation blunders and cultural faux pas that might unwittingly occur if their product positioning violates these basic ground rules. Such a translational blunder occurred when ‘Nova’, a car manufactured by the South Asian automobile giant Hindustan Motors was exported to Spain. While ‘Nova’ meant a ‘bright star’ in rest of Europe, it meant ‘going nowhere’ in Spain. You would not expect very many Spaniards to buy such a car, would you? Similarly, while the colour yellow is usually associated with a sporty, cheerful and chirpy character and ambience, it is considered a bad omen in China as it is associated with Yellow River or the river of sorrows that causes untold havoc and misery in the lives of numerous people living along its banks by flooding their homes and fields every year. A Japanese car manufacturer learnt it the hard way when its cars failed to leave showrooms in a flurry as they were doing elsewhere in the world. Thus, culture has emerged as one of the most important criteria in positioning a product, especially for companies manufacturing consumer products and services. Traditional approaches have been determined with domestic markets in mind. Such an approach, known as Local Consumer Culture Positioning (LCCP), was very prominently displayed in advertisements of ‘Marlboro Man’ where the specific traits of individuality and masculinity, so very intertwined with American psyche, were exploited to the hilt to create the image of the so-called Marlboro Man that struck an immediate cord with numerous American males. The other approach adopted by marketers, especially when they attempt to penetrate new markets, is known as Foreign Consumer Culture Positioning (FCCP) where the product is positioned as symbolic of a desired foreign culture. This is most apparent in case of perfumes and wines where any association with France is bound to increase their desirability many times over. Sometimes the name of a country is alluded to impart a unique character to the product as in Foster’s ‘Australian for Beer’ or in Harley Davidson’s ‘very American’. At times, while marketing a culturally blocked product as Kentucky Fried Chicken, in a predominantly vegetarian Indian milieu, the marketer ‘soft positions’ the product as globally popular and widely accepted by adopting the FCCP option. However, with the advent of globalisation, multinational companies have penetrated almost every economy of the world, and with consequent diffusion of products, a global consumer culture has gradually built up resulting in homogenization of global consumption that is highly interlinked with brands and their images among consumers across the world. Multinational companies are taking advantage of this new phenomenon and are now marketing their products through the relatively new technique of Global Consumer Culture Positioning (GCCP) where they are projecting well known brands and assisting global consumers to portray their desired self images by associating with these international brands. A case in point is the luxury fashion brand of Louis Vuitton (LV). It is internationally acclaimed as being the ultimate watermark of high fashion and is inseparably wedded to the otherwise nebulous concepts of discerning taste, class, craftsmanship and luxury. Through years and millions spent in carefully orchestrated campaign where LV products have been endorsed and promoted by celebrities, the brand has attained a status where a customer wearing the brand immediately appropriates all the attributes of the brand while silently yet very stridently trumpeting his or her discerning taste and elevated social status. The other prominent example of GCCP would surely be products of Apple. Though much ridiculed by arch rival Microsoft, sales of iPod exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts of avid supporters of Apple by crossing 170 million units within five years of its appearance in the market. Apple has, over the years, been able to associate itself with creativity and an aura of individuality that a consumer can acquire by shifting away from the mainstream Microsoft and purchasing an Apple product. By buying an iPod or an Apple Mac computer, an individual can assert his or her independence. The company has in no small measure played upon this theme and projected a separate lifestyle and culture that it claims is the hallmark of its products and those that use these. Thus owning an Apple product has become much more than owning a computer or a portable digital music player; it has become the proud symbol of membership of a select, sophisticated and discerning international club. Investigate the difference between high-tech product positioning and high-touch product positioning. Can some products be positioned using both strategies? Explain. Customers are often hesitant to purchase high technology products if complementary products that are essential to extract full value of the primary product are not readily available. For example, a customer would rarely buy a sophisticated DVD player if sufficient numbers of movies are not available in DVD format. Again, manufacturers of such complementary products would scarcely invest in new technology unless there is a significant customer base for the new technology. This classical chicken-egg situation is usually very common in several high technology product markets. Some firms, like Matsushita and Philips started manufacturing in 1992 subsidiary products on their own to create a market for the new technology they were bringing to the market for the first time. Matsushita had its own recording label MCA that marketed digital compact cassettes (DCC) and Philips had its own recording label Polygram that also brought to market a large selection of pre-recorded DCCs simply to ensure that their new technological offering of DCC digital audio recording equipment did not suffer from the lack of complementary products. Though this approach entailed additional capital investment, both these companies thought it to be the best option to start a process that would finally lead to increasing returns on investment. As the basic problem is creation of a sufficiently large customer base that would be able to sustain a new technology; marketers have thought up of many ways to surmount the issue. The usual techniques adopted are penetration pricing, product proliferation and wide distribution. Penetration pricing which actually means pricing, if necessary, even below current costs is evident in mobile phone industry where service providers are often found to be willing to give away handsets for free with their mobile connections. Almost a similar phenomenon is observed in Nintendo’s willingness to supply its game consoles at very cheap rates. The basic aim of these marketers is to create a sustainable base of committed customers who would be willing and eager to upgrade to newer products that the companies would subsequently bring to the market. Production and marketing of complementary products also at times help the marketers to recoup some part of their expenses incurred in providing the primary amenities or services for which their companies have been set up. Product proliferation, as the name implies, is just a corollary of successful penetration of market and it is quite obvious that marketers would attempt to serve as many customers as possible by developing a product that would appeal to the largest available segment of market since a larger base and a significant market presence is an automatic guarantee of continued growth and increasing profits. The final and perhaps most significant step for a marketer would be wide distribution of the high technology products to not only ensure the creation of a sustainable consumer base but also attain the status of industry standard so that all subsequent imitations remain one step behind forever. Some experts are of the opinion that improper implementation of the last step was possibly the main reason for failure of DCC technology to overwhelm the market as experts thought it would. An almost similar sounding but substantially different concept is high-touch product positioning. This sort of product positioning is usually done for those items that appeal more to the senses than the intellect. Lever Brothers had spent a considerable fortune in research laboratories to finally come up with a soap that effectively combined moisturising, deodorising and anti bacterial properties and seemed to be the ultimate solution that almost every consumer yearned of. While Lever Brothers wanted to position this product (named Lever 2000) as a high-tech item incorporating high technological aspirations that were the flavour of that period, the advertising agency insisted that the campaign should concentrate on ‘2000 body parts’. The advertisers had a gut feeling that technology is never a deciding factor when consumers buy a personal product as soap, rather they would respond far more favourably if there is a high-touch emphasis about the product. The advertisers further thought of utilising the contrast between high-tech and high-touch to create a space for the product in the high decibel market clutter that permeates fast moving consumer products market. The box was designed in a simple yet modern style, almost resembling the boxes in which electronic consoles and cell phones were sold but the soap was designed in a way to make it very touchable – it was rectangular in shape with softly curving oval sides that tapered all round to make the bar fit snugly in one’s hand. The colour of the bar was white with ‘Lever 2000’ imprinted prominently on the rectangular face. The launch of the product was accompanied by heavy advertisements that concentrated on the basic high-touch theme of ‘2000 body parts’ with attention grabbing images of naked body parts of various family members and how the soap would address their skin issues. While the advertising emphasised the high-touch factor it also never failed to educate the buying public of the research that had gone behind making this product that actually substituted three soaps that were needed till then to tackle three different varieties of skin issues. This is a classic example of how a high-touch campaign laced with elements of high-tech crafted phenomenal success of a new consumer product. One product that could be positioned both as a high-tech and a high-touch item is cell phone. Though its design and overall aesthetics are very important issues for a customer while making the purchasing decision, the technical features are also equally important. Read More