Place (or Position)

This is the third in a series of four articles discussing the Four Ps of Marketing: Pricing, Product, Promotion, and Place. This article is about Place.

The idea of placement was recently brought home to me as we shopped for Christmas gifts. My daughter is four and a half and this is her first Christmas to get really excited in advance. She's still young enough and innocent enough that she only asks for one present.

Last year she asked for a snow globe. That's all she wanted. And when she saw a mountain of gifts under the tree, she turned to us and said "Ohhh! I don't believe it! He got me a SNOW GLOBE!" She fished the snow globe out, turned away from all the dolls and the tricycle and toys under the tree and walked away to wind up the music box at the bottom of her snow globe.

So, when this year she asked for a "Barbie Snow Cone Maker" my wife and I began searching diligently. We had seen the ads that run during my daughter's TV show, but we couldn't find the thing. Wal-Mart didn’t have it. K-B Toys didn't have it. No stores at the mall had even heard of it.

What value is there in spending millions to advertise a product that no one can buy?

So I took my daughter to the toy store and asked her to show me the snow cone maker that Santa was going to bring to her. We finally found a snow cone maker that was NOT a Barbie product (nor even produced by Mattel).

"Yeah," she said. "That's a good snow cone maker".

So Mattel spend millions of advertising dollars to sell their competitor's products. And the only fault was not having their own product placed where we could find it.

Microsoft, on the other hand knows exactly how to manage placement. Not only do they know how to place their product on store shelves, they even know how to place their product in the minds of the consumer, which is another aspect of placement.

Let's look at each facet seperately, starting with placement in the minds of the consumer.

Microsoft has the amazing ability to tell the same lie every year and still have people believe it. Every year they "leak" information that leads consumers to somehow believe that there won't be enough of their new video games to go around.

If you had a product that you sold for $350-500 and it only cost you about $8 in plastic and $4 in Asian sweatshop labor to produce, and you had the strenght and pull of Microsoft behind you, and the knowledge and experience of Microsoft, and the bankroll of Microsoft, and the distribution systems of Microsoft, don't you think you could get that product to market in time for the largest selling season of the year?

Of course!

So why do people fall for this year after year? Why do they go out and buy ten of them and try to sell them on e-bay? Why do people get on e-bay and buy them at inflated prices when they can get them at department stores or on-line?

Because Microsoft is good at telling the story of scarcity. Microsoft is good at getting their product into a certain "place" in your mind. That placement is one of being VERY desireable and NOT very available. And so, even though you know it is a lie, you just don't want to take the risk. This is mastery of placement.

Of course, the other side of that is actually having the product to deliver. Microsoft manages this as well. They don't want shelves over flowing with their product because that shatters the myth that they already created. So they keep a steady stream of product flowing.

Never an abundance, but never completely sold out.

If we don't have it in stock, we'll put your name on our waiting list.

What excellent Positioning.