Positioning In Service Marketing

Over the years, Positioning has been defined in distinct ways by different scholars. Ries and Trout states (Ries & Trout, 2000) that positioning starts with a product; a piece of merchandise, a service, a company, an institution, or even a person or perhaps yourself. The author further states that positioning is not done to a product, rather positioning is what is done to the mind of your target; it is about positioning the product in mind of the prospect. Gary Lilien defines (Lilien & Rangaswamy, 2004) positioning as the set of strategies that firms develop and implement to ensure that its differentiation occupies a distinct and important position in the minds of customers. Positioning (Vashisht, 2005) can be defined as how a product or a

One school of thought (Baker, Graham, & Harker, 1998) believes that techniques of product positioning are very similar to what can be applied on service positioning, while another group has an approach that leads to the different theory of service marketing. It is important to know that although the concept of positioning is equally pertinent to both physical products and services (Cowell, 1989), the services positioning process has much complex characteristics such as intangibility, inseparability, perishability, heterogeneity (Baetson, 1995) and this makes the positioning of services more difficult and challenging than the positioning of physical goods (Ennew, Watkins, & Wright, 1993). It is also stated (Assael, 1985) that positioning a service is more difficult than positioning a product because of the need to communicate vague and intangible benefits. This is also supported by (Chernatony & Riley, 1997) which goes on to state that service brands are particularly different, in that they rely on employees action and attitude. Thus service characteristics differ from those of products and it can be said that it is more difficult to position the services compared to products.

Article by (Edvardsson, Gustafsson, & Roos, 2006) suggests that when service is portrayed as a perspective, the approach is clear; of course, it depends on who is portraying the service and also on the purpose. Article

The study goes on to highlight that relationship, service quality, value and strong reputation are most important to clients, largely due to intangibility and people-intensive nature of services provided. It also suggests that services require a high level of client trust and credibility (e.g. large engineering consulting projects, financial risk, and other advice) and thus demanding services which have to develop a strong brand that helps reduce the client risk. A study done by (Jalkala & Keranen, 2014) on brand positioning for companies providing customer solutions identified four strategies: customer value diagnostic, global solution integrator, high-quality sub-systems provider, and long-term service partner. These strategies indeed help organization position their services in more end-to-end methodology and supporting the whole life-cycle of services. Apart from four possible service brand positioning strategies, (Jalkala & Keranen, 2014) study also highlights that industrial firms which operate in solution-oriented business markets tend to adopt brand positioning strategies that are built around their key capabilities. Also particular “customer cases” that reflect the desired brand positioning play