Brand Positioning - How your product is positioned in the minds of consumers is critical to success

Brand positioning is related to your target marketing strategy, the target marketing strengths of your competitors and other factors in the marketing environment.  The goal of brand positioning is to identify a total brand concept (brand personality or brand image in the minds of consumers) and stress salient product characteristics that differentiate your brand from competing brands.  To understand each competitor’s product position and identify areas of opportunity, perceptual maps are developed from quantitative survey research and sophisticated multivariate statistical techniques.   

What is a perceptual map?

Perceptual Maps are widely used tools in marketing that provide a visual representation of customer perceptions towards objects (products, brands or companies), and how these are positioned in the marketplace.  Respondents are asked to make judgements based on similarity, likelihood to purchased and overall satisfaction.  Once the data is collected, aggregated and analyzed the objects can be plotted in multidimensional space. 

An Example

In a study about compact cars, respondents are asked to evaluate the similarities among several makes (Ford Focus, Chevy Aveo, Mini Cooper, Honda Insight, Toyota Corolla, Scion XB, Kia Rio and Mazda 3).  After the data is collected, the overall similarity scores for all possible pairs of objects are aggregated across the various age groups of respondents and then entered into a contingency table.  Then with the aid of multivariate statistical analysis, the similarity judgments are unfolded, transformed into distance measures and correctly positioned in multidimensional space.  The distance between objects is small for similar objects and farther apart for dissimilar objects.

While a variety of multivariate statistical techniques exist to generate perceptual maps, multiple discriminant analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and logit analysis tend to be used most frequently.  More recently developed hybrid maps are often composed by first devising a perceptual map and then introjecting preferences as “ideal points” or as “vectors.”