Perceptual Mapping is a visualization of how customers perceive your brand and your competitor’s brand, including products and services. Creating perceptual mapping models is a technique that helps businesses prepare marketing strategies that give their products and services the most significant advantage in target markets. It also captures customer perception of specific attributes about your product or service to determine if an important feature or selling point is resonating with consumers.
Conversely, this brand analysis technique can highlight a particular problem or shortcoming with a business’s general marketing communication directed towards customers in the marketplace. In a saturated, competitive market, companies need to have clear positioning to generate revenue and consistent market share and evaluate their position against competitors. Research Optimus (ROP) provides perceptual mapping models that embrace the versatility and power of complex data in an easily interpreted visual format.
Gaining a Competitive Edge
In perceptual mapping models, the position of a business’s product, product line, or brand, is displayed relative to their competition. The factors that influence consumer behavior are described on the map, both about a business and their competitors. This shows consumer perception of a brand versus competing brands on characteristics that are particularly important to the customer, whether they are functional or symbolic.
Perceptual mapping models are utilized to:
- Enable companies to track customer preferences and view changes as they occur.
- Define market segments.
- Allow businesses to understand specific components of customer behavior, like the how, what, why, and who of their actions towards competitors.
- Identify gaps in the market where a new service or product can be introduced.
- Showcase groupings of businesses that are differentiated by key aspects.
- Help businesses keep track of how a new product is perceived in a specific market.
- Track how successfully certain products or services align with a business’s positioning objectives.
Understanding how your brand is registering with customers is essential to gaining a competitive advantage and applying insights to improve marketing techniques.
Supports Brand Positioning
Perceptual mapping helps companies guide their brand positioning strategies. Based on insights revealed in the visual diagnostics, organizations can adjust their tactics to market products and services to greater effect.
It also indicates if a business is either under-positioning or over-positioning themselves in the market:
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Under-positioning
Occurs when a business’s target customer base doesn’t have a very clear awareness of the benefits of your brand, products, or services. This is usually discovered by inconsistent sales volumes, fluctuating market shares, heavy reliance on sales promotions and deals, and consumer image surveys that show consistent middle-range ratings.
In this case, a company can take the results of their perceptual map and develop a strategy that more precisely communicates advertising messages, utilizes packaging more intelligently, features a better tagline, for example.
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Over-positioning
Occurs when a business promotes a very distinctive benefit of their product, service, or brand that has minimal appeal to their target market. This can be corrected by offering a wider, more extensive range of benefits that appeal to a broader market.
Core Components of the Perceptual Mapping Process
Specialized brand analysis techniques are used in the mapping process that combines principal component analysis, correspondence analyses, and multidimensional scaling to effectively plot and interpret the perception of your brand.
For market research, people's perceptions of products or relationships between pairs of products are described through the type of data (perceptual component) combined with multi-dimensional methodologies (mapping component). This statistical method is applied to display complicated information in an engaging graphical manner.
These models sidestep the difficult statistical concepts like p-values, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing, and instead rely on graphical data that presents information in a quickly assimilated method.
An ideal perceptual mapping model will help:
- Determine company uniqueness compared to competitors.
- Identify your current position in the market.
- Analyze competitor positioning.
- Help you develop a positioning strategy.
Successfully Influence Customer Perception
Research Optimus offers an effective statistical means for organizations to influence customer perception and establish the brand identity that successfully drives marketing objectives. Perceptual mapping models from ROP are presented with a company’s goals in mind, so that interpretation is well facilitated, and insights can be garnered with confidence. Contact us today for a detailed discussion on your perceptual modeling requirements and our research analysts will take you through our process.