Taking the Mystery Out of Mapping

Kevin Gray
Regional Director, ACNielsen Customised Modelling & Analytics
ACNielsen Australia

In any product or service category consumers have images of brands and the people who use them. Brand mapping is a tool marketers can use to delve beneath the numbers and obtain a rich yet easy-to understand picture of how consumers see the market.

Questions Brand Mapping Can Answer
As a marketer, you're often faced with questions like these:

• How is our brand perceived by consumers?
• Does this differ from how we perceive it?
• Is our brand sufficiently differentiated from competitors/our other brands?
• Are there gaps in the market we can exploit?
• What aspects of its image do we need to change to reposition our brand?

Brand mapping can help give these insights.

How Does it Work?
In brand image research we typically ask consumers to rate brands on several attributes relevant to that product or service category or ask them to indicate which attributes they associate with which brands. These data can then simply be shown in cross-tabular form or plotted in a line graph, but there are two main disadvantages to either of these approaches:

1. There is a lot of information to absorb. If, say, you have 8 brands and 25 attributes that's 200 numbers in a table or points in a line graph to look at!
2. It is not always easy to tell how the ratings are related to each other.

This second drawback leads us to the essential idea behind brand mapping, which is to show findings in a graphical way which can best highlight the key insights in the data in a clear and uncluttered manner. In other words, get to the core of the findings so you can see the wood despite the trees and other associated flora.

There are a variety of statistical methods that can do this, but the basic notion is known as “data reduction” in the jargon. Once the underlying dimensions are identified, dimension “scores” can be computed and the attributes and brands plotted on these dimensions, usually in a scatter plot. Thus, you have a picture of consumer perceptions of the category that are easier to interpret than cross tabulations or simple graphics, and usually more meaningful as well.

There are approaches to brand mapping specifically, and ACNielsen will select the one our experience tells us is best suited to your needs. Perhaps the most widely-used today are Correspondence Analysis and Bi-plots. While it is true that some mapping exercises can become quite complex and interpretation can be difficult, in most cases if you follow these three basic rules for interpreting brand maps you will gain the most:

1. Brands that are close to your brand are the ones consumers think are most similar to it;
2. Attributes located near your brand are the ones consumers feel characterise it the most (relative to other brands); those far from it are those they least associate with it; and
3. Attributes near the edges of the map differentiate brands the most; attributes which do not differentiate, ie that could be consideredgeneric to the category, are situated near the center of the map.

A further benefit of creating the map charting out the positioning of the brands is that consumer segments, to whom those brands may be targeted, can also be placed on the map. So long as you get a similar read on the attributes from the consumers, usually in terms of the attached importance or relevance to the consumer, you can see if the targeted segment motivations align with the attributes of the brands aimed at them. (You don't even have to use all the attributes, the key ones alone will allow this).

An Example
Let's take a look at an example from an actual (heavily disguised) study on Chart 1 below. Here we have substituted the original category with breakfast cereals.

We can see in this case that SLIM SPECIAL and BRAN PLUS are seen as healthy, and good for a diet, but as with many “health” food products the taste is seen as boring.

“Convenient to prepare” is found near the centre of the map as is thus inferred to be a generic attribute ie marketing a cereal product on a convenience platform is not likely to bring about much differentiation from other brands. “Is mainly for snacks” is more discriminating, as it is placed on the edge of the map. However, just because something is discriminating does not mean you would necessarily want to position using that “benefit”. In this case positioning as a snack could limit consumption volume and maybe undermine nutritional messages.

In the study, four key consumer segments were identified linked to the life stages and needs, and as can be seen in this case their needs and drives align with brand promises.

Summary
Mapping makes understanding the way consumers perceive the market and what they want from a category easier and simpler, and can help provide a more actionable and insightful view of their perceptions. But a few words of warning – almost any data set will generate a map. There are a few tests for statistical rigour, but generally if it does seem to make sense the most common reasons are that the attributes have been poorly chosen, the market is more complex and cannot be summarised in 2 dimensions, or one atypical brand is skewing the whole map.