Cultivating Market Perception

10 November 2010

Market perception is going to be vital to your long-term worth as a business. Knowing how to properly cultivate this perception and promote a positive image is an aspect of business that's going to benefit you in the long run. To begin working on your market perception, it's important to develop your positioning statement and your key marketing messages.

A positioning statement is how your business expresses the way it wants to be seen by customers. In other words, put what you most want customers to know about your product/service into this positioning statement. Its all about direction and focus at this point, and having a clear direction leaves the ambiguity out of it.

The positioning statement is taking one strong position. Emphasizing the key aspects of your product and overall business comes in the supporting messages. This is where you can begin working on the overall interest of your product, by generating a buzz about it and calling for action. However, don't stray from the concrete position of your product.

Developing your positioning statement correctly will go a long way in cultivating market perception of your product and business. The key points to remember here include: targeting your customer directly and delivering an effective message that addresses their wants and needs, without alienating anyone else interested in the product.

However, it's important not to water the message down by trying to cater to everyone.

The next point to remember: make your product the solution to a customers problem. No one is going to purchase from you unless they need your product, especially in this economy, so its essential you get their attention and make them feel that they need your product.

Also, be sure to work out your unique competitive advantage. The worst thing you can ever do when cultivating market perception is the lead customers to believe that your product is just like everything else out there on the market. Even if its only the way you word your statement, be sure that you're coming across as unique.

Like your mother or father probably taught you, honesty is always the best policy. This is especially true for business. Obviously, you want your positioning statement and supporting message to be influential to customers, but you don't want to over-embellish the products effectiveness. Market perception quickly turns sour on the liars of the business world.

After you work up an honest, influential statement, its always a good idea to test it out before finalizing it. There are many ways in which you can test out a new message. Focus groups, other businesses, targeted customers, etc, are all great ways to measure the strength and quality of your statement before releasing it on a full scale.

The most important factor here, above all else, is to know your audience and to know exactly what they want from you. If you can do that, then you should be able to cultivate market perception without any problem.