3.16 Positioning

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A firm engages in positioning when it attempts to influence the way that consumers perceive its brand.  

Sometimes, the brand can help to shape this with its marketing messages.  For instance, an outdoor clothing/camping gear company might show images of rugged individuals, surviving in the wilderness, to reinforce the way that it wants its products and its brand to be seen.

At other times, a brand’s image can be positioned by forces outside of its control.  For instance, suppose that teenage skateboarders decide to wear Nike clothing.  The Nike brand, which has traditionally been associated with other sports, such as basketball and track & field, could become more associated with skateboarding in the minds of consumers – and this could be reinforced as more skateboarders begin to buy and wear this gear.  As branding guru Marty Neumeier likes to repeat, “Your brand is not what you say it is.  It’s what they say it is.”⁶

To Lobster Land management, the positioning of the park’s brand as “accessible” is a high priority.  Note that “accessible” can mean different things to different people.  To some, the term could be synonymous with “affordable.”  Others might hear the term and immediately think about logistics – how hard is it to get to some particular place?  And once there, what level of hassle is required before getting inside?  

Brands often use surveys, along with data gathered through various online social listening tools, in order to understand their positioning, as well as their competitors’ positioning, among consumers.  

Lobster Land recently commissioned a survey in order to better understand New Englanders’ perceptions of the park, as well as several competitors.⁷  The survey asked 100 theme park enthusiasts to rate each of the five parks (Lobster Land plus the four competitors) on the following eight attributes:  family-friendly, reasonably-priced, safe, conveniently-located, exciting, well-staffed, entertaining, and spacious.  Respondents scored each park on each attribute from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating “I strongly associate this park with this attribute” and 1 indicating “I strongly feel that this park is not associated with this attribute.”  

Each of those four competitor parks is described in the table below.

First, we read the dataset in, and call the summary() function to build a baseline regarding the respondents’ answers.  Since the survey responses are all constrained to values between 1 and 10, there are no outliers to consider here.  Interestingly, some attributes’ standard deviations are much higher than those of certain others – this could indicate that respondents’ perceptions of certain things are more polarizing than others.  Perhaps, for example, people who have visited these theme parks have strong feelings about their pricing, but are less likely to be passionate about safety.  

Since there is a count value of 500 for each feature, we also know now that this dataset does not contain any missing values.

Next, we call pandas’ sample() function on the dataset to see 10 randomly-chosen rows.  This gives us a general sense of how the dataset is structured, with the respondent attributes in the first eight columns, and the corresponding park name to the right.  In this dataset, each observation represents one respondent’s answers for one particular park.

To assess the respondents’ sentiments, we will take a look at faceted histograms, for which the parks are separated by column and respondents’ answers for a particular attribute are displayed as a distribution.

Turtle Town clearly takes top honors here for family-friendliness.  Given its narrow positioning – literally, all of its rides are designed for children – this is no shocker.  Shark Zone, whose positioning is the complete opposite – stands out here in the other direction.

For reasonable pricing, we can see that Franklin’s Tower leads the pack.  Given the inexpensive land costs in rural New Hampshire, and the need to attract visitors to this sparsely-populated area, Franklin’s Tower must price itself competitively.  Wavy Waters, a water park with considerable staffing and cleaning requirements, is showing the most right-skewed distribution here.

The distributions for “safe” may reflect the difficulty that respondents face in answering this question.  Unless a theme park visitor personally experienced, or witnessed, some sort of safety problem on a ride (or perhaps a safety problem involving a patron), they might just give parks the general benefit of the doubt, and rate them highly here.  Franklin’s Tower stands out a bit among its peers – perhaps, because of its large amount of space and open land, people might feel some unease there that they would not experience in a more crowded place.

For “conveniently located” we can see here that Lobster Land performs best among the group.  Its proximity to a major interstate highway (I-95) and an Amtrak station with quick service to Boston could help here.

Looking at “exciting”, we can again see that Lobster Land does reasonably well, especially considering that it balances family-friendliness with (some) truly thrilling rides.  For this attribute, Shark Zone and Turtle Town’s positions have reversed, compared with the way they were perceived for family-friendliness.

For the “well-staffed” attributes, the parks tend to have similarly-shaped distributions.  Wavy Waters and Lobster Land both feature quite a few water rides, and it seems that respondents notice the way these parks are staffed appropriately.  Lobster Land’s relatively small size probably helps out here – visitors to the park know that they are never far from a staffer in a red golf shirt.

Shark Zone takes top honors here for “entertaining.”  The other parks tend to do well here, which is a good thing – it would be a sign of major trouble if a theme park rated poorly for this attribute.  

Larger parks clearly do better for the “spacious” attribute.  Here, the distributions for Turtle Town, Lobster Land, and Wavy Waters all look quite similar, with an almost uniform distribution.

Finally, the correlation heatmap below offers some insights about the correlations among the respondents’ answers.  It reveals, for instance, that perceptions of “safe” and “family-friendly” tend to be positively correlated, whereas more exciting parks tend to be seen as less family-friendly.

So what should Lobster Land do with these results?  It depends.  For starters, management should be glad to know that for the two accessibility-related features here (convenience of location, and reasonable pricing), the park did quite well.  

As for other areas, Lobster Land (as well as any other brand) needs to know that it cannot be all things to all people.  With that in mind, a brand should not necessarily rush out to “fix” the parts of a perception survey that reveal areas for which people show a preference for the competition.  The brand might even want to rethink who it considers the competition. For instance, since Lobster Land is an affordable theme park, it should not benchmark itself against parks that are more lavish. Lobster Land would also benefit by comparing itself to parks that are geographically closer to it since they are likely to compete for the same consumer dollar. If Lobster Land wants another perspective on who the competition is, the park could comb through social media comments or customer feedback to glean for clues on who else is top of mind – and why. Focus group discussions could form a part of the park’s subsequent research.

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⁶ https://www.martyneumeier.com/#home

⁷ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kennywood_Turtle_DSCN2734.JPG

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