Marketing 8112 Perceptual Maps and Product Positioning

Why Perceptual Mapping? Most products and services have many physical and intangible attributes with varied consequences for a would-be purchaser. An automobile is not merely "an automobile." Rather, for a consumer, it is a bundle of objective and subjective characteristics (size, color, ease of handling, roominess, comfort, price, and so on) and consequences (such as feelings of pride, power, or prestige). The marketer's task is the difficult one of deciding how many attributes to build into the product, how much quality to include in each attribute, and how to put the attributes together to gain a competitive advantage. Fortunately, due largely to implicit coping strategies employed by consumers in everyday decision making, only a few product attributes are important in any actual choice process. Indeed, two or three key attributes are often sufficient to predict consumer choices. As products become more complex and consumers become more sophisticated, however, marketers must build more attributes into the product. Note, too, that key attributes vary by market segment and therefore the marketing effort must change accordingly. The conjunction of key product attributes and consumer perceptions (or beliefs) can be fruitfully represented in a perceptual map. Figure 1 presents one consumer's perception of beers for sale in northern California. Perceptual maps can also be prepared for groups of consumers and market segments. The dots show the perceived positions of different beers (disregard the circles for the moment). The two most common methodologies used to produce perceptual maps are multidimensional scaling and factor analysis. Notice first in Figure 1 that this consumer uses two attributes to describe beers: heavy or light and bitter or mild. Some people employ more attributes and different ones (for instance, gaseousness and calorie content), but the two in the figure are quite common across the population. Notice further that the brands cover much of the map. This indicates that the consumer believes that brands differ on the two dimensions to a considerable degree. San Miguel is perceived as a rather heavy, bitter beer, for example, whereas Miller Lite is seen as a very mild, moderately light beer.