Influence Mechanism Of Brand Positioning Effectiveness From A Consumer Perspective

Positioning is the center of marketing strategy.Based on the study of Christoph Fuchs,brand positioning involves four types:features positioning,direct benefits positioning,indirect benefits positioning and surrogate positioning.We define positioning effectiveness as the extent to which consumers perceive a brand to occupy a favorable,differentiated and credible position in the minds of consumer.Positioning effectiveness is formally modeled as a multidimensional construct which includes four interrelated dimensions that jointly describe a brand's overall positioning success from consumer perspective.Positioning effectiveness reflects the actual result of brand positioning activities from which we can evaluate whether the positioning is success or not.Based on the study of Christoph Fuchs,the type of positioning can affect the positioning effectiveness.But there is no research explored the mechanism of how the type of positioning would affect the positioning effectiveness.Identifying how knowledge about the market is represented in consumers' mind is fundamental to understand and explain a multitude of consumer behavior phenomena.We can understand and explain the how dose the positioning messages work in the mind of consumers'through the sensemaking theory.Based on the sensemaking theory,this paper is going to explore the specific mechanism of how the type of positioning affects positioning effectiveness to fill this gap in the theory.This paper builds the theory model and puts forward the hypotheses based on the literature review:the type of positioning strategy as dependent variable,the schema match as moderator variable,and the positioning effectiveness as independent variable.This paper is an empirical study to investigate the mechanism of how the type of positioning strategy affects the positioning effectiveness.We investigate the car owners and the potential customers of cars to get the date,and use SPSS20 as well as Process to analysis the date to draw a conclusion.The result of the research indicate that schema match affect the relationship between the type of positioning strategies and positioning effectiveness.Also,the result shows that the extent of schema match could improve the positioning effectiveness.The higher the extent of schema match,the higher the positioning effectiveness.The extent of schema match has positive relationship with the dimension of the positioning effectiveness:favorability,credibility,dissimilarity and uniqueness.Besides that,the user positioning doesn't perform well all the time.Since the user positioning depends on the consumer's cognition and perception.Once the message of the positioning mismatches the consumer's schema,the brand can't establish positive relation in consumer's minds and this will lead to unsatisfactory positioning effectiveness.This paper is going to explore the mechanism of how the type of positioning affects positioning effectiveness to fill the gap in the theory.Besides,since consumer's schema is different,it can generate different positioning effectiveness with the same type of positioning strategy.The corporation should capture the accurate target consumer in the spread of the positioning to improve the positioning effectiveness.This serves the Target Marketing another theoretical foundation.In the marketing practice,the corporations do not know exactly about the importance of brand positioning,or how to do the positioning.Also,there are some companies get stuck into the positioning,cause they over emphasize the concept of the positioning,but ignore the fact that the biggest contribution of positioning is to open the age of mind in marketing.The positioning that corporation made is based on the corporation but the location in consumer's mind.It's common that the corporation ignores the mind of consumers',but just considers the corporation's goal.The brand like that can't occupy the unique position in consumer's mind in market that crowded with homogeneous offerings.The measure of positioning effectiveness can help the corporation know exactly about the result of positioning activities in marketing practice,and recognize the importance of positioning to establish a distinctive brand image and brand core value.Second,the evaluation of positioning effectiveness is beneficial to modify the positioning strategy in dynamics and continued marketing activities,and it would also improve the brand development.And finally,the corporate should understand the target consumers' schema about market sufficiently to enhance the positioning effectiveness.The two innovations of this paper are:First,put forward the mechanism of how positioning strategies affect the positioning effectiveness.The studies of positioning effectiveness are center on the relationship of the positioning strategies and the positioning effectiveness,lack of the mechanism of the relationship.This paper takes the schema match as the mediator to explain the mechanism.Second,specify the variable measurement.The former studies used to measure the positioning effectiveness with three dimensions scale(differentiation,favorability,and credibility),this paper use the newest four dimensions scale to measure the positioning effectiveness(dissimilarity,uniqueness,favorability,and credibility).