Product positioning is not a one-time operation. It is on going process that never ends. A company president once said: “How can we ever position ourselves in a marketplace that is changing every three months?” He had a good point. Dinamic positioning is a tricky process. The only way to survive in dinamic marketplaces is to keep the positioning process flexible. Companies must be willing to experiment and learn and change. There is no right and no wrong. In fact, the path to success is often filled with failures.
Marketing people like to think they “know” their market. They do analyses of the market, then develop detailed marketing plans as though the outcome is decided deterministically. But in fast-changing industries, companies are often breaking new ground. No one can really “know” the market. The market doesn`t even exist yet. In these industries, almost all new products are experiments. Few leading-edge products are perfectly in tune with the market when they first come out. Instead, they are modified and altered once they meet the market. There`s a lot of give and take.
In some ways, the process is the mirror businesses, companies survey people to find out what they want, then create a product to fill the need. In technology-based industries, the product usually come first. Companies invent things and develop things. Then, they work with the market to see how the product should be used.
