An Ultimate Guide To Brand Positioning Mapping

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After analyzing hundreds of brands and their mapping technique, we have created this ultimate brand positioning mapping guide to help you know all the essential information. Brand Positioning Mapping will help you decide your brand’s marketplace if you optimize its basic information.

Thus, if you’re also interested in exploring this topic and letting your brand skyrocket. Let’s begin the guide !!

What Is Branding Positioning Mapping?

Brand Positioning means a height or place you want your brand to reach. Brand Positioning Mapping refers to analyzing and seeing the positions in the map through different mapping techniques.

Brand positioning mapping aims to determine the consumer’s wants and desires towards a product or brand in the marketplace. Hence, the brand positioning mapping does the same as required. Once you know the consumers’ demands, you can establish your positioning brand accordingly.

For the best example, you can look at “Burger King” as how they have set themselves up as the king of burgers in the marketplace. They fulfill all the needs and wants of consumers while also giving them a superior position in the brand market. This strategy has taken them this mile away toward brand success.

Every product has a place to be established in the market, and so does your brand. All you need to do is to understand the positioning requirements and consumer opinion. After analyzing these maps, you can quickly figure out a lot for your brand.

Why Is Brand Positioning Mapping Important?

Brand positioning mapping helps marketers to determine the position where the product or services will be most effective.

Creating a perpetual map helps marketers to differentiate their brand from competitors. As a result, it helps in reviling unique ways to market the product. Also to identify the segment of consumers to tap to.

Besides customer segments & positioning, it helps in building brand elements like visual identity to its color, typeface, and graphics. Plus it creates opinions, perceptions, etc about the brand, which marketers should focus on building.

Create a Brand Position Map

Draw a position map

There is no single way of creating perceptual maps. Companies usually use their own method of creating a perceptual map by assessing their customer’s opinions about brand against their competitors. But as per the theoretical concept for a positioning map template usually consists of a box with four quadrants, separated by a horizontal and a vertical line.

Choose two important attributes

Whether a brand is assessing the products, services or brand itself, it’s important to use brand’s barebones map wisely, by focusing on two important attributes. 

On the X axis, you can measure affordability, with the right side of the horizontal line representing ‘very affordable’ and the left side representing ‘expensive’. Your Y axis can represent, as an example, friendliness, with the top part labeled ‘very friendly’, and the bottom part as ‘unfriendly’. 

Add your business and its competitors

The next step is to place the brand and competitors on the map in the place that most accurately represents their position in the marketplace, according to consumers and brand.

In many cases, consumers don’t know the extent of product & service benefits. Consulting an impartial third party will give a closer and more objective analysis of positioning.

Determine the positioning gap(s)

As the positioning map starts to fill, it gets easy to understand the brand’s positioning in the marketplace. Now, its time to understand gaps between the brand & other competitors.

• Lower competition in the quadrant of ‘expensive and friendly’, presenting a newer place to position your brand.
• Opportunities in ‘affordable and unfriendly’, but you may not wish to position your brand in this way.
• Increased competition in ‘affordable and friendly’, but one that presents some good avenues.
• No occupation in the ‘expensive and unfriendly’ quadrant, which is probably a good thing.

Repeat steps 1-4 with alternative attributes

Determine whether your positioning map has given you valuable insights into potential positioning gaps, niches or segments. 

If not, consider trying the process again but instead focusing on different attributes, perhaps ones that are more meaningful to your brand and consumers. These could be unique features or benefits of your product or service, such as speed, user-friendliness, availability, durability, and so on.

It’s a case of trial and error when it comes to positioning maps and repeating the process until you can find a profitable and rewarding niche that you can position your brand in. 

Consolidate your analyses to create a positioning statement

Once you have identified the best position for your brand, you can begin to craft a unique mission statement. This statement usually comprises a single paragraph that describes your brand’s offering(s) to your consumers that set it apart from your competitors. 

Consider your target audience, product and service category and how you can prove that your offering delivers value and benefits to consumers.

Create a strapline, slogan, or tagline

Once you have crafted a statement, you can go a step further by creating a top-level strapline, slogan or tagline, a condensed version of your statement, if you will. You can use this when networking with customers, stakeholders, suppliers or referral partners externally, as a way to market your business and highlight its USP (unique selling points) to interested third parties.

Brand Perceptual Map and Product Positioning Map

Both Brand Perceptual Map and Product Positioning Map is one of the effective ways of marketing that helps develop the brand, product, or service positioning strategies of a business in the market.

These two mapping techniques are measured and shown in the graphical representation on the X and Y axis. Each of the axes represents two different variables. Their line indicates their extreme in terms of quantity and quality. When you finally create these lines and label them with the respective criteria, you are good to go to map the existing brand or its products.

Then, if you know where your competitors exist on the map, you can also define your brand’s or product’s position. Please create multiple such maps with different variables.

Product/brand position map or brand perceptual map are similar terms. They are often interchangeably used as well. However, both the terms have differences, and we have mentioned the key differences below:

Perceptual Map

Perceptual Map represents the positioning of dominant and competing brands. It is from the consumer’s perspective in the marketplace. It is essential to realize that the Perceptual Map only measures and shows the perception, as there is a significant difference between consumers’ opinions and market reality.

The Perceptual Map can be something other than the reality of the brand or product, as the consumers might have a different approach or viewpoint. Thus, you need to understand that viewpoint and mold your positioning grid. 

Positioning Maps

A position Map doesn’t mean to measure and represent the consumer’s perception of a product and brand. It instead comprises different essential attributes for defining the market positioning of all the competing brands or products in the market.

As you can study the competing positions of the brands with the Positioning Maps, you can make the required changes in your strategic brand positioning to set your brand at the top or for brand leveraging. You can enter a gap or competition depending on your wish.

Benefits of Perceptual Maps

Helps In Unlocking the Insights About the Competitors and Industry

Perceptual maps help represent all the brands in the market through their relative positioning. It is based on the consumer’s perspective towards these brands. The line of axes helps in signifying the brand attributes. We have also mentioned a perceptual map below to have a better understanding.

This visual graphic representation is far better than the tabular representation, as it will lead you to understand and adapt the results more quickly.

In the above example, you can easily see that the natural sugar substitute has a proximity advantage over any artificial sugar. And “Truvia” uses raw sugar, while “Equal” uses fake sugar. It shows that most consumers are more likely to go for natural sugar substitutes instead of artificial ones.

To know the actual brand positioning chart, you should create various perceptual maps, as it will let you judge the brands, competitors, and the marketplace through multiple elements or variables. We have mentioned a few more perceptual maps below to give your brand positioning mapping clarity.

As you can see in these maps, the taste and preferences of sugar consumers have a broad scope. It will help you create a better strategic brand positioning. 

Communicates Where The Brand Is Heading

Brand perceptual maps tell you about the consumer’s opinion and thought process towards a brand or product and where any brand is with the upcoming change and future.

If you properly study the perceptual maps, you can even reposition your brand in the market. To explain this phenomenon, we have mentioned one more visual example below:

Here, perceptual represents the goals or ambition of the “Equal.” It simply means that Equal wants to reach there from its current position. Therefore, perceptual maps can be the best method to establish a brand strategy.

It Helps In Confirming the Alignment With Your Business and Brand Strategy

One of the most crucial benefits of perceptual maps is establishing an alignment in the brand strategy. Perceptual maps also help determine whether our brand has a proper position in the market. It matches its work with the brand’s mission, vision, and scope. Which can later help the company in building umbrella branding.

We have mentioned some of the most-asked questions considering a brand’s present and future position in the marketplace:

• Does this brand position align with the brand’s strengths, assets, and capabilities?

• Does this brand express the value we offer to our consumers?

• How sustainable and defensible your brand position is in comparison to your competitors?

• Does this brand position have credibility and is compelling to its consumers?

In the “Equal” brand case, the company has not so focused on natural sugars and tried to compete with brands like Truvia.” Eventually, they lost their position from the excellent brand poisoning maps in the marketplace. Therefore, they have launched a whole new brand named “Naturals” while considering the demands of sugar consumers.

Final Words

Brand Positioning Mapping is a technique to gather all the ongoing information regarding the competing brands in the marketplace. Thus if you want to establish your brand correctly in the market, these maps will help you know exactly what you need to do.

We hope you like the article and that this article helps you find all the relevant information regarding brand positioning mapping.