3 tools towards finding your positioning (perception map).

Positioning is a marketing term that describes the position that your brand occupies in the mind of your consumer, ideally that position should be built with each interaction that the consumer has with your brand, and that includes customer service channels as well as image product itself. However, one of the main challenges that entrepreneurs or brand managers in charge of new projects face is finding that position, either because you are in a niche category or because you have an offering with many virtues, finding something so Synthetic as a single positioning will no longer be so difficult thanks to these 3 tools.

1. Perception map.

When your category is very competitive, your best option to survive is to be different from the others. In this case, this tool is a visual way to find where you should occupy if you are in doubt.

Many of the greatest brands have achieved this simply by taking the opposite position of their strongest competitor, that is why in this case we have to start by finding the values that best identify To the main competitor in the industry or category, this is a tool with which you get better results when working in a team, so prepare a few minutes of work with a varied group of your colleagues (it should not take more than 30 ‘) .

Make a list of your main competitors organizing them by relevance, and before meeting with your team, list some pieces of communication of each competitor, it can be their website, a business card, a commercial, a brochure, a press release, any material issued directly by the company is useful.

As a team, look at the communication pieces and answer the following questions:

What values does this mark literally convey?

What phrases are most important? What does your slogan say? What emotion does that phrase convey? This being an exercise in perception, any contribution is valid, however We are only going to take into account the most recurrent ones or the ones most accepted by the majority of the participants.

What values are passed underneath?

What story do the images tell? Are they sweetheart images? Are they product images? Are they images about the technology used?

The intention is to find the values that are repeated the most or are mentioned the most times, once identified they must be separated into category values and brand values, for example, if your company is a money order company, perhaps one of the identified values has been security, if it is a value that also recurred in all other competitors then it is a category value.

Now you just have to create the perception map, which will be a matrix between the two most important values in the category. Continuing with the money order example, we are going to fill in the following perception map using three strong competitors in the Colombian market as an example: Supergiros, Efecty and Western Union Giros y Finanzas. We have to clarify at this time that this is an illustrative example made by a small group of people in order to demonstrate the use of the tool, however some market trends can be seen and a better decision can be made when choosing a position that differentiates us from the competition.

Category values: Service vocation and Safety.

Most representative values of Superdrafts: Reach, Superiority.

Most representative values of Efecty: Specialization, Scope.

Most representative Western values: Trajectory, Recognition.

As you can see in the following image, this is a category where the vocation of service and safety are paramount, and the two main actors in this comparison of perception want to be located in the upper right corner of our diagram, with a slight overlay of Western using a trajectory image in telling his long story and highlighting the worldwide recognition this trajectory has brought him. For his part, the third actor; without neglecting security; It is very repetitive about the scope it can give its clients, also assuming a nominal relationship with a sense of superiority reflected in its slogan: “why spins when there are super spins”, a different position that allows it to compete.

What place should a brand occupy then to compete in this category? As we said before, the best place is the most opposite that can be taken care of from the main competitor, in the following table you will see what we mean:

As you can see, in this category they are very important Security and a vocation for service are important, and these are values that should always be presented in a positive way, so your brand should be in the upper right quadrant of the map, however in the image we can see that a brand could decide to actively build as only on the perception of security or the perception of vocation of service as such, acquiring that unique and valuable position: “When you think about security, think of us” or “Come and try the best service in turns”.

More dynamic categories are built with another series of values according to the expectations of their respective target markets, as we can see in this example taken from notebookdemarketing.com

It should also be clarified that there are different ways to build a perception map, the methodology that we expose here is especially useful for entrepreneurs who are doing a market study, or for people in charge of a new project within a company.

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