Perceptual Map Template

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.