Perceptual Positioning & Perceptual Mapping

When we define Perceptual mapping we say that it is basically a technique to represent what people think about products or services, people or ideas. Technically they are all objects. It is a spatial representation of the perceptions about the brands on the parts of different individuals. If you perceive the brands to be similar then you are getting them closer in the perceptual space, and if you perceive them to be dissimilar then you are putting them apart. In short, I can say that it represents both brands and people.

As everyone knows that the environment is turbulent so it changes fast and calls for frequent changes in positioning. At times a company can lose its position due to change in technology, consumer attitudes, competitive activity both in the economy and amongst creative executives. That is the reason why a company should be in touch with the market place, and reposition itself before it suffers in terms of products, image and revenue.

Key Points

• Perceptual maps help marketers understand where the consumer ranks their company in terms of characteristics and in comparison to competing companies.
• Perceptual maps can display consumers’ ideal points that reflect their ideal combinations of product characteristics.
• When creating a new product, a company should look for a space that is currently unoccupied by competitors and that has a high concentration of consumer desire (ideal points).
• A perceptual map is usually based more on a marketer’s knowledge of an industry than market research.

Key Term

• Demand Void: Areas without any significant consumer desires; typically found in ideal point maps of perceptual mapping.
• Price elasticity: The measurement of how changing one economic variable affects others. For example:”If I lower the price of my product, how much more will I sell? “”If I raise the price, how much less will I sell? “”If we learn that a resource is becoming scarce, will people scramble to acquire it? “