What's up brand builder Stephen Houraghan here at BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this video you're
going to learn how to create a perceptual map for your positioning strategy so you can quickly and
visually identify the strategy of your competitors and uncover gaps and opportunities in your market
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visuals using strategy psychology and creative thinking then you're in the right place hit that
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now more and more brands and brand leaders are beginning to understand the importance of
positioning a brand effectively but just because awareness is higher than it used to be it doesn't
make the task easier in fact it makes it more difficult but perceptual mapping is a strategy
that you can use to uncover what your competitors are doing and what you might do differently so
what is perceptual mapping well it's a tool that brand strategists use to uncover the positions of
their competitors in the market by using a couple of key variables to identify where on the grid
they sit now using these key variables they'll be able to identify what it is that they do well
and what they do not so well so they can identify gaps and opportunities and that's essentially
what perceptual mapping is all about so why use a perceptual map well as a brand strategist when
you sit down to determine the best approach for a brand it's not always clear the best foot forward
the best direction forward and it's not until you really understand your competitors and what
they're doing well and what they're not doing well can you really define the best approach for your
brand so it's really about understanding your competitors understanding using those variables
that i mentioned before where they sit on the scale and then from that information being able
to determine where your brand might fit where they might be able to create a position in the
market that your competitors are not using so let me give you a quick perceptual map example using
fashion brands now when it comes to fashion brands two main key variables that the audience would use
to make decisions about what they're going to buy would be quality and price so these two variables
can be used here on a perceptual map to determine where the competition in this category is sitting
are they sitting towards the high end on price are they sitting towards the high end on quality or
are they sitting towards the low end on price and the low end on quality or somewhere in
between but using these key key variables and mapping your competitors you can see quickly
where your competition is playing so how do you create a perceptual map well it's pretty easy and
i'm going to give you a three-step process that you can use step number one select your attributes
now your audience will make decisions about what they want to buy differently in different
industries so you need to understand what's important to your audience in what they want from
the product or service that your brand offers what is it that will help them to make those decisions
so once you've identified that that can be your variables that you use in your perceptual mapping
and you can get creative here so you can use multiple different variables and you can combine
different variables on different perceptual maps step number two score your competitors
so now you've identified the variables that you want to use now you want to score each
of your competitors individually for each one of those variables now the best way to do that
is to just grab a spreadsheet and for each one of your variables put that into a single column
and then put all of your competitors in the first column and just score them individually once you
have all of those scores then you have the raw data that you can use for your perceptual mapping
and step number three map your competitors so you have all of that raw data now that raw information
that you've gathered in your spreadsheet and now you simply want to take two variables at a time
create a perceptual map for each and then plot those competitors now as i said the more data
you have here the more variables you have here the more opportunities you're going to see your maps
are going to look different depending on the variables that you use and the more creative you
get with this more data you use the more variables you use the more chances you have in seeing gaps
and opportunities in the market now you can plot all of this information by hand or you can use
tools that are out there in the marketplace one tool that i've come across is group map and this
will allow you to plot perceptual maps but it's also very useful to bring into brand strategy
workshops as well so that's just one tool there are many tools out there but as i said it's just
as easy plotting this by hand now there's no doubt that positioning strategy is probably one of the
hardest tasks in all of branding but it is made easier when you use tools when you're able to see
the information visually then you can uncover gaps and opportunities much more effectively
and perceptual mapping is one of the best ways to do that but when you do sit down to position your
brands then you need to understand the different approaches that you can use to position your brand
effectively this video will show you nine different approaches that you can use for
your positioning strategy until next time brand like a master and i'll see you in the next video