HP Positioning: Analyze your results, draw conclusions (such as, do you think the product or service is competing head-on or is avoiding competition?), and if needed, make recommendations about the positioning of your chosen product.

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The way to determine a product or service's current position in the marketplace compared to the competition is with a customer perceptual map. Most of your staff are not familiar with this concept, so you provide them with an example.

Choose a product or service and identify three companies who manufacture it. For example, you might choose peanut butter as the product you will study. Then identify three peanut butter manufacturers. Next create two questions about how the peanut butter product is positioned compared to its competitors, the other two brands of peanut butter. Ask six people your questions and plot their answers on your perceptual map. Analyze your results, draw conclusions (such as, do you think the product or service is competing head-on or is avoiding competition?), and if needed, make recommendations about the positioning of your chosen product.

Examples of customer perceptual maps may be found at: Perceptual Mapping.

The chosen product is a HP printer. There are many players in the printer industry. Prominent of them are:
Brother, Canon, Epson, Founder, Fujian Start, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Kyocera Mita, Lenovo, Lexmark, Minolta-QMS, NEC, Oki, Panasonic, Samsung, Sindoricoh, Star Micronics, Trigem, TVSE, VeriTek, Wipro, Xerox, etc.

Perceptual mapping and HP Printers
Product's position is the way the product is defined by consumers on important attributes. The place the product occupies in consumers' minds relative to competing products. Positioning is expressed relative to the position of competitors. The ability to spot a positioning opportunity is a sure test of a person's marketing ability. Successful positioning strategies are usually rooted in a product's sustainable competitive advantage. The most common basis for constructing a product positioning strategy are:

* Positioning on specific product features
* Positioning on specific benefits, needs, or solutions
* Positioning on specific use categories
* Positioning on specific usage occasions
* Positioning on a reason to choose an offering over the competition
* Positioning against another product
* Positioning through product class dissociation
* Positioning by cultural symbols

Key to winning target customers is to understand their needs better than competitors do and to deliver more value.

Perceptual Map helps in spotting the gaps in the marketplace. It helps you to see if you are launching into a crowded marketplace. It helps you to understand who your closest competitors are. As a result of this it helps inform decisions being made about an organisations marketing activities. I have taken two broad characteristics of printer, which are:
1. Price
2. Product Features/Technology will include (Speed, Paper capacity, Cost per page, Other special features , (Fax/Email/Copier/Scanner), Networking, After sale service)
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