Positioning with the ‘Attribute Positioning Model’

In our consumer analysis, we got a broad understanding of which attributes are important in the optician sector, and how the different optician retail brands are perceived and evaluated in terms of these attributes. Ideally, the attributes will reflect the underlying motivation that drives purchase behavior, and can therefore be essential for a positioning strategy¹⁷⁶. Therefore, we like to present what we want to call the ‘Attribute Positioning Model’.

Originally, the model is called ‘the Expectancy-Value Model of attitude’ and introduced by Martin Fishbein (1980) and further developed by Larry Percy and Richard Elliott (2009)¹⁷⁷. The result of ‘The Expectancy-Value Model of attitude’, called the Fishbein Score, is applied for discussion of positioning strategies, and this is our objective as well. Though, in order to make the model usable to our thesis, we have changed and adjusted the originally approach, calculation method and final score and named it the ‘Attribute Positioning Model’. By implicating this model, we want to discuss positioning strategies, inspired by either focusing on being the best performer of one or several attributes or changing the degree of importance of the attributes.

175 Martineau, Pierre (1958) ’The Personality of the Retail Store’

176 Percy, Larry and Elliot, Richard (2009) ’Strategic advertising management’ p. 178

177 Percy, Larry and Elliot, Richard (2009) ’Strategic advertising management’ p. 179

If attributes are to be used for positioning strategies, we want to look for attributes that fulfill three criteria¹⁷⁸: 1) they need to be important to the target audience, 2) a brand can deliver them, and finally 3) a brand can deliver them better than other brands.

In our consumer analysis, we asked the participants to rate the importance of the five attributes plus evaluate the different brands in terms of how they score on the five attributes.

In Appendix 12 and 16, we can see the results of that. Now we will use these results and add them together in a table, in order to discuss the positioning approaches with the ‘Attribute Positioning Model’.

Our model is based on the essential element of the original ‘Expentancy-Value Model of Attitude’, which in our case is to find the attributes that are relevant, when choosing an optician retailer. Therefore we plug them into our ‘Attribute Positioning Table’. Next ‘the Expentancy-Value Model of Attitude’ focuses on the general importance weight of each attribute, where Percy and Elliot have suggested to distinguish between three categories;

3=essential, 1=desirable, and 0=of no importance. In our model, we will not follow this suggestion, but instead involve the figures that emerged from the consumer analysis, however we need to turn them around. The participants were asked to prioritize the importance of the attributes by giving 1 point to the most important and 5 to the less important, whereas the model requires the opposite. Therefore, as service e.g. was given an average of 1,5 among the focus group of 20-40 and as a result weighted to have high importance, service now scores 3,5. So in our ‘Attribute Positioning Model’ like the original, it applies that the higher the score the more essential the attribute is, we just use another number scale.

Finally, ‘The Expentancy-Value Model of Attitude’ plugs in the consumers’ beliefs of how each brand delivers upon the different attributes. Percy and Elliot suggest the following rating: 3=definitely delivers, 1=does OK, and 0=does not deliver, and again we like to ignore their recommendation and plug in our own data from the consumer analysis.

Now we have all the required data to calculate the final score¹⁷⁹. According to Fishbein, all attributes should be added, but we have subtracted one factor. This is done due to the negative

178 Percy, Larry and Elliot, Richard (2009) ’Strategic advertising management’ p. 178

aspect of price, as we saw in our literature review, a high price is related to an economic sacrifice. Even though the result of the focus groups showed differently, we still believe price has a determent effect and wants to apply it, which is the reason why we change the calculation method of the score.

Table 1: ‘Attribute Positioning Table’

Looking at how each brands score between both groups, it once again shows, that the optician sector is a market, in which it is difficult to distinguish the brands from each other. The difference between each score is only marginal, and we see no obvious winner. The highest difference in the final score is seen in the young group, where Nyt Syn and Profil Optik only

179 Example: If we look at service in the group 20-40 as an example, the Score is calculated like this: Score = Service:(3.5x3.2) + Design and Atmosphere:(0.2x2.7) + Assortment:(2.0x2.8) + Accessibility:(2.8x3.8) – Price:(1.5x1.5) = 26

20-40

Service

Design &

Atmosphere Assortment Price Accesibility SCORE

Louis Nielsen 3,2 2,7 2,8 1,5 3,8 26

Nyt Syn 3,0 3,3 3,2 3,0 2,3 20

Profil Optik 3,0 3,2 3,2 3,5 2,8 20

Synoptik 4,5 4,5 4,2 4,0 4,8 33

Thiele 3,8 3,8 3,8 4,0 3,7 26

IMPORTANCE WEIGHT 3,5 0,2 2,0 1,5 2,8

40+

Service Design &

Atmosphere Assortment Price Accesibility SCORE

Louis Nielsen 2,6 3,1 2,9 1,6 3,5 17

Nyt Syn 3,0 3,0 3,0 3,0 0,1 13

Profil Optik 3,8 3,8 4,0 3,9 3,0 18

Synoptik 3,9 3,4 4,0 4,3 4,3 18

Thiele 4,0 3,9 4,4 4,4 4,1 20

IMPORTANCE WEIGHT 3,9 1,0 1,8 2,5 0,8

score 20. But as touched upon before, this group does not know or is not that familiar with those brands, so these scores might be misleading.

Now that we have calculated the final score of each brand, we are now able to discuss the positioning strategies that Fishbein introduced. A brand can either focus on being the best performer of one or several attributes or change the degree of importance of the attributes.

According to Fishbein, the brand must score as high as possible under each attribute to affect the score positively and gain the highest score among all brands.

The first positioning strategy is to be the best brand performer of one or several important and not least most relevant attributes, which consumers value. We know by now that service is the most important attributes of all five, and based on the consumer analysis, the brands Synoptik and Thiele score high in both groups. If e.g. Louis Nielsen was to approve its total score, the brand should try to improve its service image, which will effect the consumers’ perception of that attribute. By getting a higher service score, it will then increase the final score. Though, we do like to stress that it might be a challenge to position a brand upon an attribute that other brands are already delivering strong, and especially if it is an attribute that consumers expect and take for granted, like we saw earlier when analyzing service.

The other positioning strategy focuses on changing the degree of importance of the attributes, and especially of that attribute the brand scores high on. Looking at the importance weights of the different attributes, design and atmosphere is in total ranked as the far less important attribute, but the majority of the participants give most of the brands a high score. This means that brands like e.g. Synoptik and Thiele which score highest on design and atmosphere can take advantage of this gap between a low importance of weight and a high attribute score.

These brands should try to increase the level of importance and if they manage, it will increase the final score positively.

We believe that both positioning strategies are relevant and important to have in mind, when we next are to discuss which positions are attractive in the optician market and how to gain that position. Though, we do need to be aware of the fact that these positioning strategies do not necessarily guarantee an attractive position, where all the four criteria are fulfilled.