What is a perceptual map and why perceptual mapping is important
A perceptual map is a visual representation of a customer’s perception of your product or service. Perceptual mapping comes in handy when trying to understand what your customer is thinking.
The structure of a perceptual map is pretty simple. You pick two attributes and ask customers how strongly they relate your products to the attributes. We place each attribute on either axis of a graph and plot the customer scores.
Let’s take the example of fast food. When asked to rate various brands on the attributes of how healthy the food is and how many locations exist, here’s what customers might say.
As we can see, Subway is strongly associated with healthy eating, and they have a wide network of stores. Hence, they’re located at the top right corner of our perceptual map. On the other hand, hotdogs from a street vendor are easy to find but not associated with healthy eating. Hence, it’s closer to our map’s top left corner.
The closer a product is to a particular attribute, the stronger the association. For instance, McDonald’s has a strong association with having lots of locations.
How businesses use a perceptual map
With your products plotted on a perceptual map, a goldmine of information is waiting to be gleaned. Businesses use perceptual maps to:
- Identify gaps in the market. This can be to either launch a new product, or course correct existing products’ positioning.
- Identify how your brand has been perceived and better its positioning
- Understand the positioning of competitors’ products as well.
How to frame questions for perceptual mapping
With any perceptual map, the idea is to ask customers how strongly they agree or disagree with a statement and ask them to rank their opinion on a scale. As it can be with any kind of feedback, more is better; hence a 10-point rating scale is best. Offering a larger rating scale also allows for better differentiation between the products or services you are comparing.
When complete, your survey should look a little like this:
How strongly would you associate <product name> with <attribute>?
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How strongly would you associate <product name> with <attribute>?
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The best part about perceptual maps is that the more questions you ask, the better the insights, so filling your surveys with multiple questions is good. However, do so with a touch of moderation, as survey fatigue can lead to a lower response rate. Additionally, irrelevant questions might lead to incomplete surveys and insufficient data.
Learn more about how to prevent survey fatigue here.
Suggestions for how you can use perceptual maps
Perceptual maps work well in various use cases. Here are a few examples of how you can use it.
- Identify gaps in the market/products: Ask customers to rank your products based on price, Value for money (VFM), performance, etc.
- Improve aspects of your business: Ask customers to rank your online support, field service, website sign-up, demo request, service fulfillment etc, across parameters like ease of use, ease of access, the time taken to log a request, etc.
- Understand brand perception: Useful in identifying if there’s a mismatch between how you want customers to perceive you and how they actually do.’
- Plot attributes over time: This helps you understand whether the efforts you’ve made over time have helped or hindered how you want customers to perceive you.
Where perceptual mapping falls short
As invaluable as perceptual maps might be, they’re not infallible. One of the key drawbacks they present is the inability to compare more than two attributes at once. As a result, multiple perceptual maps must be created to ensure customer preferences are accurately mapped.
Secondly, it’s important to ensure that the attributes you’re comparing don’t show any correlation. For instance, consumers are likely to associate price with perceived quality. As a result, higher-priced products may also rank higher on quality, regardless of whether that’s actually true. Ensure that the two attributes you’re comparing are free of any negative or positive correlation.
A third limitation is data gathering. The data needed to form a perceptual map is usually obtained through surveys and can be difficult to obtain. Fortunately, online survey software like Freshsurvey can make data collection much easier.