Individual Project

Task 1

1. Relevance and importance of positioning and repositioning for marketers

Burberry is a huge brand in the fashion industry and is offering quality products to the customers. It was founded in 1856 and since then added a great range to its total variety. It offers the options in clothing, accessories, perfumes and cosmetics which shows that it is capable of fulfilling the different demand of customers related to fashion (Phan, Thomas and Heine, 2011).  It was found that the products of Burberry were improved specially the variety of handbags as sales for same increased 16% in the year 2017.

It was a result of new additions of bridal and buckle begs which attracted new segment of the buyers which were not targeted before. It shows that the referred to brand is going in more up market as keeping this category at focus it is going to plan its future product range. As the favourable results are already achieved by this brand it shows that for markets it is important to position and reposition their products. It assists the firm in establishing a greater competitive position in the market which is not easy to defeat by the other brands. As it is done after analysing the demand and trends of the customer better targeting is done which further reduces the gap between actual and desired sales.

As detailed study of needs of the market is done before actually repositioning to product there are higher chances of getting improved sales. It will lead to greater market share and will increase the brand recognition (Straker and Wrigley, 2016). Apart from this through the positive shifting customer loyalty is raised which leads to effective relationship with them.

2. Positioning map

Positioning map is a tool through which it is identified that how brands are position itself against the market situations. It defines the product compared to competing products. Marketers often plan brand positions that give their products the highest competitive benefit in the particular target markets, and they then design the marketing mix to create these planned positions (Schöpflin and et.al., 2013).

 

(Figure 1Positioning map of Gucci, Primark and Burberry)

Figure 1: shows the position of different brands. Burberry as shown in the figure is lying in first quadrant which shows that it was earlier using the classic approach and was delivering goods at comparatively low price. No change in the products were made according to the fashion and marketers emphasised on raising total sales through other tactics. Thereafter, as the figure depicts it is moving towards the high market and soon will be part of the fourth quadrant. Here the brands change their offerings as per the trends in the market. It will be soon a fashion brand which has capacity to achieve the competitive advantage that will be achieved by delivering new product range to the customers. This will result into increase in the prices of Burberry offerings. Apart from this two other brands are also compared here which are Primark and Gucci. The positioning map shows that Gucci is already lying in the section where change is adopted according to the demand and trends of fashion and products are made available at high price. It depicts that Gucci is going to give a tough competition to Burberry as both brands will have the latest products which has equal demand by the customers.

Last but not the least is Primark. This is another brand in the same industry. The map displays that this brand is not changing its products and services according to the alteration in the fashion trends and is making its products available in market at comparatively low prices in comparison to Gucci and Primark. Therefore, it is not a threat for the other two brands.

3. Methods for Burberry to achieve repositioning

There are different ways through which the selected organisation can reposition itself in the market. In context of same spirit of giving can be of great help. In the current scenario people favour more to the brands which are socially active and does good to the society as well. by collaborating with more foundations or charity firms it can reposition itself in the market (Fuchs and Diamantopoulos, 2010). Other way which can be adopted by this firm is to enhance the customer engagement. Buyers like to get engage with the company they are dealing with and when they are welcomed and provided with personal contact it gives more satisfaction to them and improve customer loyalty too. Burberry can work on its customer relationship management techniques to reposition itself successfully in the fashion industry.

Conclusion

From the above report this has been concluded that Burberry is leading towards an up market as it has brought much change in its present products and services. If the repositioning is done as per the planning, then there are greater chances for achieving the set targets and achieving competitive advantage. In order to reposition the brand company may adopt different strategies which includes getting more involved in social activities and working on CRM approaches.

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References

• Kotler, P. and et.al., 2017. Marketing for hospitality and tourism.
• Phan, M., Thomas, R. and Heine, K., 2011. Social media and luxury brand management: The case of Burberry. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing. 2(4). pp.213-222.
• Schöpflin, R. and et.al., 2013. Modeling nucleosome position distributions from experimental nucleosome positioning maps. Bioinformatics. 29(19). pp.2380-2386.
• Fuchs, C. and Diamantopoulos, A., 2010. Evaluating the effectiveness of brand-positioning strategies from a consumer perspective. European Journal of Marketing. 44(11/12). pp.1763-1786.