Positioning and Map
Chapter 4 TUTORIAL FOR POSITIONING ANALYSIS Concept
There are three broad concepts associated with this tutorial: Differentiation, Positioning, and Mapping. Differentiation is the creation of tangible or intangible differences on one or two key dimensions between a focal product and its main competitors. Positioning refers to the set of strategies organizations develop and implement to ensure that these differences occupy a distinct and important position in the minds of customers. Thus, Kentucky Fried Chicken differentiates its chicken products by using a unique blend of spices, cooking vessels, and cooking processes and positions its products as “finger-lickin’ good.” Mapping refers to techniques that enable managers to develop differentiation and positioning strategies by helping them to visualize the competitive structure of their markets as perceived by their customers. Typically, data for mapping are customer perceptions of existing products (and new concepts) along various attributes, perceptions of similarities between brands, customer preferences for products, or measures of behavioral response of customers toward the products (e.g., current market shares of the products). Maps generated by this software are spatial representations in Euclidean space that have the following characteristics: (1) The pairwise distances between product alternatives directly indicate the “perceived similarities” between any pair of products, i.e., how close or far apart the products are in the minds of customers. (2) A vector on the map (shown by a blue or red line) indicates both magnitude and direction in the Euclidean space. The length of a vector indicates its magnitude. A blue vector geometrically denotes product attributes (i.e., direction in which the labeled attribute corresponding to a vector is increasing) and a red vector denotes the direction in which an individual’s preferences are increasing. (3) The axes of the map are a special set of vectors that could
There are three broad concepts associated with this tutorial: Differentiation, Positioning, and Mapping. Differentiation is the creation of tangible or intangible differences on one or two key dimensions between a focal product and its main competitors. Positioning refers to the set of strategies organizations develop and implement to ensure that these differences occupy a distinct and important position in the minds of customers. Thus, Kentucky Fried Chicken differentiates its chicken products by using a unique blend of spices, cooking vessels, and cooking processes and positions its products as “finger-lickin’ good.” Mapping refers to techniques that enable managers to develop differentiation and positioning strategies by helping them to visualize the competitive structure of their markets as perceived by their customers. Typically, data for mapping are customer perceptions of existing products (and new concepts) along various attributes, perceptions of similarities between brands, customer preferences for products, or measures of behavioral response of customers toward the products (e.g., current market shares of the products). Maps generated by this software are spatial representations in Euclidean space that have the following characteristics: (1) The pairwise distances between product alternatives directly indicate the “perceived similarities” between any pair of products, i.e., how close or far apart the products are in the minds of customers. (2) A vector on the map (shown by a blue or red line) indicates both magnitude and direction in the Euclidean space. The length of a vector indicates its magnitude. A blue vector geometrically denotes product attributes (i.e., direction in which the labeled attribute corresponding to a vector is increasing) and a red vector denotes the direction in which an individual’s preferences are increasing. (3) The axes of the map are a special set of vectors that could