Understanding Marketing Placement:

In the 1960’s when the 4 P’s of marketing began providing a theoretical framework for developing a strategic marketing mix, “marketing placement” (or convenience if you’re going by the 4 C’s) commonly referred to where your product was located and providing convenient customer access or distribution channels. However, in the 1960’s there was no internet, no amazon, and no practice overnight delivery services.

As the brandscape continues to change and grow, creative strategists are continually developing new ways to connect products to people, and therefore, increase the challenges of selecting the appropriate channels for market coverage. Now, it’s not only important to provide customers with convenient access to your offering, but also provide your product convenient access to your market. That’s why we extend the designation of place to include “placement”.

Strategic marketing placement is the art of being in the right place at the right time.

Marketing placement also requires balance with promotion and carries a two-fold decision tree, not only identifying appropriate strategies to enable customer convenience and access, but also the appropriate channels for “where” that access exists. This allows companies to conveniently execute strategies that enable access to your product at that point of engagement. Hopefully you believe in the saying “there is a right time and place for everything” and understand its relationship to market placement.

Using the bottled water model for example, in today’s brandscape, we would follow the different methods of distribution and placement. For a general water-brand, you might find this product at you local food-stores, gas stations, and convenience outlets. There may also exist a specific website where brand-loyal customers would be able to find special deals and incentives to reward your customers buying behavior. At this point, we routinely balance placement with promotion to identify strategies that best promote your offering in the brandscape. Placement fills in the gaps of where in the food-store, gas station, and convenience outlet your market is most likely to exist (top shelf, end-caps, next to premium water, etc).

For premium water brands, the importance of placement is commonly elevated as the market becomes more segregated and niche-like. A water with holistic health benefits at a premium price may only be placed in nutritional stores, wellness centers, spas, select sporting goods, organic sections of select markets, and high-class restaurants, etc. Here, placement is more controlled and defined as a larger part of the promotional strategy itself – which we’ll talk about next.

Now you can begin to see how placement exists to provide a link between you product or offering, convenient access, and strategic promotion, and also how it can be used as a promotional strategy in itself.