Mapping Brand Perceptions: Tools for Strategic Positioning

Brand positioning can be represented on a perceptual map. This, again, is a tool like the SWOT analysis that has been used for many, many years by marketers. And what it essentially does is look at two dimensions of a product, right? So Y and X-axis.

Along one axis, in this case, the X-axis, you are looking at the market in terms of products with higher quality or lower quality. On the Y-axis, you're looking at higher prices and lower prices. This works best when there is a trade-off or inverse relationship between the two dimensions, as in, generally speaking, to have higher quality, you have to charge higher prices, right? So this could be used across any industry, and you can swap out the dimensions to other things, right? But let's focus on price and quality.

So brand A would be a high-price, high-performing, let's use a car, the automobile market as an example. So brand A would be a high-performing, high-price automobile brand. So let's say Porsche or any of the other luxury cars, we'll say Porsche.

Now, brand B would be a lower-quality, lower-priced automobile. And brand C would be somewhat higher than average, if we say average is the midpoint or the intersection of these two axes. So this is a bit higher than average quality and a bit lower than average price, right? So let's... So who would be interested in each of these? Well, brand A, with a higher price, will have to be more affluent customers, right? Brand C would be more mid-market, people looking for a reasonable price and a reasonable level of quality.

And brand B might be first-time car buyers, people who wouldn't be able to afford brand A, or maybe not even brand C, and they want to get acceptable quality for what they can afford. So if A is Porsche, C might be Toyota Camry or some mid-market car. And brand B would be something along the lines of Nissan Versa, which at this point in time is considered the least expensive car brand, right? Now, what about here? Would you want to be here, with a higher-than-average price and lower-than-average quality? Of course not, because you'll soon be out of the market.

People will make a trade-off and will accept less quality if it means a lower price, but it still has to be an acceptable level of quality, right? But what they're not going to do is pay a higher price for poorer quality, right? There has to be a trade-off. You have to get a lower price for that. So how do brands use perceptual maps? Well, it's good to understand how customers are perceiving you, but it's also a useful tool to see where you might be able to tweak your brand's positioning, right? Now, one important concept of perceptual maps is that they are perceptual, meaning that this is based upon how consumers perceive, which may line up with reality, but some cases may not.

Consumers may perceive that a different brand is of a higher quality than brand A when, in fact, brand A is actually of higher quality. So in some cases, if the perception doesn't line up with the reality, you have to refocus your marketing messaging so people understand that, oh, actually, we are the better quality car, right? So that's one way you would look at it, but it also provides opportunities. So let's just say you are brand D and you look at this chart and you say, well, brand C has a higher quality obviously than brand B, but not as high as brand A, but what if I put myself right here and I can pick off some of the brand A right here below brand A, right here below brand A and above brand C somewhere in this area.

And I can pick off some of the market for brand A by providing a close-in quality car, but slightly less expensive. And I can perhaps pick off some of the brand C by providing a slightly more expensive car that has a slightly higher quality. So this type of perceptual map will enable you to look for and find opportunities in the market that you can provide offerings to meet those opportunities.

Okay. Now let's discuss the brand value proposition. A brand value proposition is the overall promise or value that a brand offers its customers.

This encompasses the values and emotional connection that the brand offers, right? And it should be delivered in a concise statement representing or explaining the benefits the brand delivers to customers. And a way of doing that is we help X the customers do Y, you know, what the value that you offer by doing Z, and that's the support that explains how you're going to divide that value. All right.

And when you're building a value proposition, there are some essential questions that you need to answer. Which customers are you going to serve? Which needs are you going to meet, right? As you know, let's go back to the first point. You may identify a number of different potential customer markets for your services, but you want to prioritize them to identify the highest potential markets, the ones, and also the ones in which you might have the greatest competitive advantage.

So which customers are you going to serve and which of these needs are you going to meet, right? So we can't do everything for all people. You have to pick which people and which things you're going to do for them. And those things should be benefits that your competitors cannot offer or cannot do as well as you.

And then what relative price will provide acceptable value for customers and acceptable profitability for the brand? That matters as well, right? The pricing is a big part of this, and you can't exist in a market where you are offering a price that's not going to allow you to provide the value that you are promising, right? So value propositions are essential parts of your marketing strategy. But what's even better than a value, a unique value proposition, which means that you alone can provide this particular benefit. Sometimes, when products or brands are new to a market, a new product, a new service, they can develop a unique value proposition, you know, more readily.

And that's why, in some cases, brands will expand the market by segmenting a new audience for which they're offering a new value proposition that had not been offered previously by competitors. So let's identify a unique value proposition. It's the distinctive aspect or characteristic of a brand that sets it apart from competitors, right? And a strong UVP, unique value proposition, should be clear and concise.

It should offer a compelling benefit, something that's going to resonate with the targeted audience. And it's compelling because it's not targeting everyone, but it's targeting the people for whom that is important. The more you understand about your targeted audience, the more you'll be able to determine which feature or which benefit is going to be of most relevance and most compelling.

And you're going to focus on that competitive advantage within your unique value proposition. And you're going to demonstrate this to your customers over and over and over again. It's like Volvo showed how their cars are safer because of all the testing they did, the crash test dummies, and all of that.

That's what good marketing does. It shows and does. Now, let's look at some brand value propositions from brands that I'm sure you are familiar with.

Uber, the smartest way to get around. They didn't say the cheapest or the most comfortable, or they said the smartest. And why would that be the case? They had a unique value proposition when they launched.

Who are their competitors? Taxicabs, limousines. And how did you get a taxicab? You'd have to call a taxi company, deal with a dispatcher, and wait around 10 minutes, five minutes for the car to arrive. And depending upon how supportive or that taxi dispatcher was, you might have a good experience or a terrible experience.

But it was not a smart way to be able to acquire transportation. I live in New York City, and I remember that during the era of the yellow taxicabs, I had to stand on a curb and put my thumb out, and hopefully a cab would stop, and there might be two other people waiting along with me, and it would pass me for that person. And it was almost impossible to get a cab when it was rush hour or when it was raining.

Well, Uber changed all that, right? It was smart. You can just use your phone. You can see the prices.

Unlike a cab, where you're getting the cab and depending upon how much traffic it is, it will impact your price, and you don't know when you get in how much it's going to cost. And of course, there are stories of tourists who are taken for long rides by cab drivers since they weren't familiar with the city. But Uber changed all that.

Before you got into the cab, you had an idea how much it costs, an idea of how good the driver was, right? So it was the smartest way to get around. Apple iPhone, the experience is the product, right? If many Android users will, I'm an Apple user myself, but many Android users will tell you how Android has better technology, and you know, but that's not the point. The experience is the product.

It's not the technology that's the product. It's something about owning an Apple product that many consumers are thrilled about, right? And I say thrilled because it's not uncommon when they launch a new product that people will wait outside of the Apple store overnight to be the first online to buy it, because it's something about that experience that thrills them. You know, it could be, I know for my personal use, it's because I can connect it to my other Apple devices, right? My phone, my tablet, my laptop.

The experience of Apple is the product. Slack, you know, Slack is a business teams software, you know, allows teams, even remote teams across time zones, and functionality to be able to work together on projects. When it was launched, it was one of the first of that type of software, and their claim was be more productive at work with less effort, right? Be more productive, that's the promise, and work with less effort, right? Compared to the existing approaches at the time of spreadsheets and phone calls, etc.

You're going to pull all that together in one convenient platform. Starbucks, espresso for everyone, right? So that sounds simple, but what is meant by that? Before Starbucks came to town in many parts of America, people weren't familiar with espresso. Espresso is something that you drink when you're in Italy or in a big city, but it's not in many parts of the country.

It was, you know, the choices they had were caffeine or decaf. So by saying espresso for everyone, Starbucks is basically delivering on their positioning, right? Specialty coffee, high-quality beverages, a unique coffee experience, similar to the coffee experience you would get in a European coffee shop, right? Airbnb exists to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Now think about what that means for a moment.

Before Airbnb came into existence, where did people stay when they traveled? They stayed at a hotel, usually in the downtown of major cities, near the airport, or perhaps a resort, which could be a wonderful experience, but you are sort of segregated to certain parts of that city that you're visiting. When Airbnb launched, their promise wasn't that, hey, we are cheaper than hotels, or what they were saying was that when you visit a city, there's a lot of that city's culture that you're going to miss out on if you simply stay at the hotels where the tourists normally stay. I live in Brooklyn, New York, and it's not uncommon for me to see throughout the day people walking down my block with luggage trailing behind them, and I know they're an Airbnb visitor.

Normally, they would never have stayed in my part of Brooklyn. They would have been in Manhattan, in one of the hotels in Manhattan. Now they can get some of the culture of Brooklyn, and I can travel to Paris and stay in a suburb outside of Paris and have an experience I normally wouldn't have.

So what is their positioning? Their unique, sorry, proposition? What is their unique value proposition? Create a world where anyone could belong anywhere, not just in the big downtown hotels or the resorts, but anywhere, any neighborhood you can be in. And finally, Canva, empowering the world to design. Now, Canva was one of the first platforms that made it easy for people to design.

You know, they had templates, they had all kinds of tools, and nowadays, with AI, even more tools to generate images, etc. And a person who wasn't an experienced designer, who didn't study design, could use Canva and design things. So empowering the world to design.