The following situations frequently arise in market research practice:
- A consumer survey generates a vast number of ratings of the company’s own brand and those of the competitors;
- The results of an employee satisfaction survey can be broken down by department.
The presentation of such results in tabular form is often awkward, because it is difficult to recognize structures contained within such masses of numbers.
This complicates the central marketing task, which is to understand and strengthen the positioning of the company’s own offerings, and differentiate them from the competition, in a targeted and planned fashion. Only those companies or products with a clear and outstanding positioning in the market are well placed to compete.
Mapping procedures help in gaining a quick and clear overview – as in the motto “a picture is worth a thousand words” (or in this case “numbers”). They make it easy to recognize which products are similar, which products fill niches, and what their weaknesses are in comparison to the competition. Relevant procedures are …
