Positioning and Differentiation Paper Research Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Positioning and Differentiation - Research Paper Example They also need to differentiate themselves from the competitors in order to be attractive to the customers. Failure to position and differentiate from competitors will make it highly difficult for business to survive and sustain growth in today’s highly competitive business world. This paper analyses and compares the positioning and differentiation strategy adopted by two health insurance companies in the US. The two companies chosen are: UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint, Inc. Positioning Positioning is a marketing process used to position a product or a service in the mind of the customer in the best way that the company believes that the product or service must be perceived by the customer. There is very little change that is made to the product unlike the name product positioning suggests. Positioning is all about changing how the product is perceived by the customer (Ries & Trout, 2001). Therefore, positioning is the essence of a marketing mix. It throws light on how the c ompany defines its market segments, its competition and target markets (Schiffman & Kanuk, 2007). It does not induce any new features into a product or service but uses the existing features in order to project the product or service in an effective way to the target market. ... By highlighting the differences between its competitors, businesses try to make its products and services more attractive to the target customer group (Hoskisson et al., 2008). Differentiation is vital for any product or service as it will create a niche for the product or service within a well defined closed target market group. Therefore, a well differentiated product or service will have a competitive advantage over its competitors. Successful differentiation will also give a business the freedom in pricing the products and services as the differentiating features will make for the extra cost from a customer’s perspective (Hoskisson et al., 2009). UnitedHealth Group With headquarters in Minnetonka, Minnesota UnitedHealth Group is one of the leading health care companies in the world. Across the globe, the company serves more than 75 million people. It offers a range of products and services to its customers. UnitedHealth Group was created in 1977 but its origin can be dated back to 1974 when a group of physicians and healthcare professionals founded the Charter Med Incorporated. The company was incorporated with the main purpose of increasing or expanding consumer’s health coverage options (UnitedHealth Group, 2012). Today the company has grown on to become the biggest health carrier in the United States. Positioning UnitedHealth Group which primarily started as an insurance company has diversified its products and services to cater to the needs of the entire health care industry. The company positions itself as leading health care companies which not only address the needs of consumers with heal benefit products and services but also the service sector of the health care industry. It