Volks-Wagon’s Product Positioning

Volks-Wagon’s Product Positioning

The way a company markets its products and sells the ideals of the company to their target market is important. We see this in the recent scandal that Volks-Wagon is associated with. The company has spent years building their image around a safer and more economic alternative to the other car companies. They were one of the few companies that still produced compact cars with diesel engines, which separated them from their competitors because they claimed that these diesel engines produced safer emissions for the environment. This is an example of a priori segmentation, which is stated in our textbook on page 80 to be a marketing segmentation approach in which the company or manager of the study decides on the basis of research before performing the research. In the instance of Volks-Wagon, before offering the diesel engine in their vehicles, the company studied their competitors to find what the need in the market was and where they could potentially fit as well as find the most success. The company found that there were too many car companies catering to the psychographic segmentation, which on page 81 states that this segmentation consist of consumers that purchase products based on their lifestyles as well as the image they are trying to build for themselves. Therefore, Volks-Wagon found their niche in the benefit segmentation which offers products to consumers that are looking for a benefit from the product. In Volks-Wagon’s instance, they were trying to offer a cleaner and more ecofriendly product that was also better on gas mileage which offered a benefit to the consumer on a financial standpoint as well as being more ecofriendly.  The company successfully made it all the way through the marketing segmentation process and went forward with the product to only find that the car did not perform as they anticipated it would or that they planned for it too. At this point the company was faced with two ethical options, one being that they reanalyze the market and find their proper position based upon the product they created, or go back and redesign the product to better fit the idea that the company was trying to market. As you can see based on the news time they are currently receiving that they choose neither of these options, and instead decided to create a program that they installed into the vehicles that would falsify the emission results whenever tested.