Perceptual Map Template
Visually represent customers’ perceptions of your company, brand, product, or service.
About the perceptual map template
What is a perceptual map?
A perceptual map is a visual representation of customers’ or potential customers’ perceptions. Perceptual maps are used to assess organizations, brands, products, ideas, goods, or services.
Perceptual mapping is a powerful diagrammatic technique. To create a perceptual map, you must first draw two or more axes. The axes display your company’s product, brand, or service relative to your competition. Many marketers and product managers choose to use different size circles to represent sales volume or market share of competing products, though this is optional. You can then ask participants to rank competing products relative to each other along these axes. The resulting map gives you insight into how customers feel about competing products in a given market.
What can you use a perceptual map to assess?
You can use a perceptual map to assess a wide range of attributes such as price, performance, safety, and reliability. There are a variety of benefits to using a perceptual map.
Benefit 1 - Gain a better understanding of your product is positioned in a given market. If you’re operating in a dynamic, crowded market, it can be hard to know how your product measures up to the competition. If you’re operating in a small, new market, it can be equally difficult. Perceptual maps are vital for gaining insight into your relative strengths and weaknesses.
Benefit 2 - Discover how customers and potential customers perceive your brand. Many businesses ship goods or services without any view into why their customers bought them -- or why potential customers failed to do so. Perceptual mapping puts you in touch with your customers’ decision-making processes.
Benefit 3 - Assess your competition’s strengths and weaknesses. Since perceptual maps situate your business relative to your competition, it can help you figure out what your competitors are doing right and wrong.
Benefit 4 - Help your business understand gaps in the market. When your business is successful, it can be easy to keep shipping the same (or similar) products year after year without iterating. Perceptual maps help you explore the market and probe for unseen gaps, which might be ripe for exploitation.
Benefit 5 - Understand changes in customer behavior and purchasing decisions. Maybe your customers suddenly stopped buying a certain product, or maybe they started buying that product en masse. Either way, it’s crucial to understand why so you can make decisions going forward. A perceptual map gets at the heart of customer behavior.
Why use a perceptual map?
You can use a perceptual map to understand what your customers think about you and your competitors. This can help you track market trends, identify gaps in the market, and develop your branding and marketing strategies.
Get started with this template right now.
Empathy Map Canvas by Jack León
Works best for:
Research & Design, Market Research
Empathy Map Canvas is an essential tool for capturing user insights. By visualizing what users think, feel, and experience, you can create more effective and user-friendly designs. This template is perfect for teams focused on user-centered design.
2x2 Prioritization Matrix Template
Works best for:
Operations, Strategic Planning, Prioritization
Ready to set boundaries, prioritize your to-dos, and determine just what features, fixes, and upgrades to tackle next? The 2x2 prioritization matrix is a great place to start. Based on the lean prioritization approach, this template empowers teams with a quick, efficient way to know what's realistic to accomplish and what’s crucial to separate for success (versus what’s simply nice to have). And guess what—making your own 2x2 prioritization matrix is easy.
Cynefin Framework Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Decision Making, Prioritization
Companies face a range of complex problems. At times, these problems leave the decision makers unsure where to even begin or what questions to ask. The Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden at IBM in 1999, can help you navigate those problems and find the appropriate response. Many organizations use this powerful, flexible framework to aid them during product development, marketing plans, and organizational strategy, or when faced with a crisis. This template is also ideal for training new hires on how to react to such an event.
Sailboat Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Meetings, Retrospectives
The Sailboat Retrospective is a low-pressure way for teams to reflect on how they handled a project. By defining your risks (the rocks), delaying issues (anchors), helping teams (wind), and the goal (land), you’ll be able to work out what you’re doing well and what you need to improve on for the next sprint. Approaching team dynamics with a sailboat metaphor helps everyone describe where they want to go together by figuring out what slows them down and what helps them reach their future goals.
Empathy Map by Pino de Francesco
Works best for:
Research & Design, Market Research
The Empathy Map template helps you understand your users' needs, behaviors, and experiences. By visualizing what users think, feel, see, hear, and do, you can gain deep insights into their motivations and pain points. This template is essential for creating user-centered designs and improving customer experiences.
REAN Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Strategic Planning, Meetings
First introduced in Cult of Analytics, the REAN model is used to measure and understand the efficacy of marketing efforts. REAN stands for Reach, Engage, Activate, and Nurture, the main stages a marketer’s audiences experience during a typical journey. The REAN model helps marketing teams develop useful KPIs that can help capture how well their marketing or ad campaigns are working. Many teams rely on the REAN model because it is adaptable to a variety of marketing efforts, including planning measurement frameworks, setting goals, deciding on objectives, and mapping digital marketing channels.