Following the maps that lead to marketing information.
You’ve heard of the map to the stars, but what about a map for marketing? Perceptual maps fill that role for us, and I’m going to explain them for you on today’s episode!
SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ2XGgbNXWY
This month, I am plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank. To get more information, or to find out how to donate your time/money/food, visit their website: https://stlfoodbank.org/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
One of the most delightful things about marketing is finding things that go together that seem like they shouldn’t.
Like chocolate and peanut butter.
Or mango and chili.
Or chicken and waffles.
Or polka dots and stripes.
Or breakfast for dinner.
Or dinner for breakfast.
It’s always fun to find new combinations. But often in the competitive marketplace, we’re not looking for things that shouldn’t go together, but things that should, often based on our competitive strategy.
For example, we often want to see sales go up when we start spending money on marketing communication.
We want to see interest in our products go up when we start a new promotion.
We want to see engagement go up when we make a new announcement.
And we want to see preference for our brand go up with awareness.
And we have measurements to look at all of those things. But sometimes, it’s hard to know if you’re seeing things change because you’re really improving or if it’s just because the market itself is on the rise. And so it’s usually a good idea to get some comparative statistics about your competitors.
But just staring at charts of comparative data all day isn’t something that’s fun or easy for most people to do, and it makes a really lousy slide to include in your update deck when you’re talking to the C-Suite.
It’s even harder to see what sorts of strategies you need to employ.
Fortunately, marketers have a powerful tool at their disposal to simplify all of this process, and it’s called a perceptual map. And hey, since marketing research is in my wheelhouse – it’s what I do for a day job, after all! – I’m going to talk you through how to make one today.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Before we begin, let me just say that there are multiple ways to create a perceptual map, including more complicated methods I’m not going to touch on today like multidimensional scaling. The method I’m going to share today is the one I teach in my graduate-level marketing strategy course to MBA students who are largely non-researchers.
In other words, this is something anyone can do, and I’ll even include a link to a helpful video in the show notes that will teach you exactly how to make the graphics that I have in the video version of our podcast.
But even if you’re just listening, don’t worry – you’re going to get a good understanding of what perceptual maps are useful for, and the videos are there if you want to see them in action.
So let me start by explaining what a perceptual map is. It’s a graphic where you look at two different attributes of a product or brand plotted against each other like a graph. So, for example, you might look at attributes like “awareness” and “preference,” or “value” and “quality,” or “desirability” and “luxury.” Ideally, you aren’t just looking at your brand, but also competing brands so you can see how things compare. And the data you use to create these usually come from consumer surveys where you’ve asked participants to rate every brand they’re familiar with from a list of the ones you want to include.
I’ve already used a lot of research language there, so let’s switch over to an example, because then I think things will start to make a little more sense. So there’s this old adage in sales that you can have things good, quick or cheap, and at most, you can have two of those things. But all three are just not possible most of the time, and if you happen to see someone who is offering good, quick and cheap all at once, watch out, because one of those things is going to disappear before too long.
So let’s think about 12 different fast food brands that offer some combination of good, quick and cheap. I’m going to name them each and give you my impressions here. Keep in mind I’m a vegetarian and haven’t eaten at a lot of these places in years, so I’m basing my opinions off my memory and what other people tell me.
- So we have McDonald’s, White Castle and Taco Bell, which are cheap and quick but lower in quality
- Burger King, which isn’t quite as cheap or quick, but a little above average in quality
- Sonic, Subway, Dairy Queen, Jack in the Box, Dairy Queen and Arby’s, which I’d put in the average all the way around
- Five Guy’s, Chipotle and Chili’s, which are all higher in quality but also in price, and which vary in speed
- Chick Fil-A, which is probably as close to all three characteristics as anything we’re talking about
On a perceptual map, we’d expect to see some clusters just like what I described there.
And so let’s take a look. I dummied up some data based on a random algorithm I wrote to use my own impressions as a seed and to have some fake survey responses generate the rest. Now this isn’t AI-generated; it’s just random with my own bias built in to guide things. That also means it’s not real. But it’s good enough for our purposes.
Our first perceptual map plots speed against value, and what I did in this fake survey was ask our make-believe participants to rate each fast food chain on a scale of 1-5, with 3 being average. 1 is low – it means low value, low speed or low quality – and 5 is high, meaning high value, high speed, and high quality.
And what we’ll see in this graphic is pretty much what I expected. You could almost draw an arrow from “low speed, low quality” up to “high speed, high quality” and plot every one of these brands on it.
At the bottom, we have Chili’s and Five Guys, which are the most expensive and also the slowest. They pretty much own their quadrant.
We have a lot of brands stuck in the middle, like Chipotle, Subway, Dairy Queen and Jack in the Box.
And then beneath McDonald’s and Taco Bell, we have three brands really close to each other – Sonic, White Castle and Arby’s, with Burger King stuck sort of between average and above-average.
And then Chick-Fil-A is off doing its own thing with average value, but McDonald’s and Taco Bell-level speed. If I were looking at this from actual data, I would suggest Chick Fil-A has carved out its own niche, as indeed it has in real life.
OK, let’s look at a plot of value versus quality now. And this time, our perceptual map has the brands arranged in the direction of a downward arrow where as value goes up, quality goes down. That’s what we’d expect, but it’s still interesting to see it.
On this map, Five Guys and Chili’s are both in the top left quadrant, but they’re not close to each other. They both have their own market space carved out. But what we have is a lot of brands fighting in a cluster for the middle space – average quality, average value, or fighting in a cluster to be average quality but high value. And that average quality high value group includes Taco Bell, White Castle, McDonald’s, Sonic, Arby’s and Burger King, which means that these six brands are all chasing the same sorts of mass market customers while the folks in the middle – Jack in the Box, DQ, Subway and Chipotle – are maybe content to be an alternative option for a more distinct target market.
And once again, Chick-Fil-A is doing its own thing, with average value but high quality. I’m actually really surprised how well my random data set fits real life for them.
Now we’ll take a look at one more perceptual map, and it involves plotting speed versus quality. This map is very interesting because we have several distinct clusters that show up all over the place. Five Guys is up in the top left corner as offering high quality, but low speed, and below it are sitting Chili’s, Chipotle and Subway with medium quality and low speed.
We have a ton of brands battling for the middle space in being thoroughly average. The three that really stand out as being different are McDonald’s and Taco Bell – this time with below-average quality but high speed – and Chick-Fil-A, which is on its own for both high quality and high speed.
Again, reflecting reality pretty well. But then, as I said, we did seed this dummy data set with my own biases, so of course I agree with it.
But what I hope you’re realizing is tremendously cool about these three maps I’ve been describing is that they show how brands are actually being perceived in the market and how they’re being understood competitively.
If I were a marketing manager for Chipotle and I found myself stuck near Subway on every one of these maps, I’d be concerned, because I’d feel like Chipotle ought to be getting more credit than Subway for at least quality, and that’s not happening here.
Likewise, if I were the marketing manager for Burger King, I’d be uncomfortable with how my brand is always stuck in this weird place where I’m a little above average, but not different enough to occupy my own space on the perceptual map. I’d want to be known for higher quality, which I’m not, and for stronger value, which I’m currently behind five other brands on.
Now, you might also ask me, “Sean, we’re actually measuring three dimensions here across three maps. Couldn’t we make a 3D map and do it in one?” And the answer is yes, we could, but no that’s not a good idea because it’s really hard for people to read on a two-dimensional display.
But something we could do is add a third dimension in the size of the bubbles around the brand names. I used a bubble chart in Excel and mapped the size of the bubbles to the market share for each brand based on how many people rated that brand in my dummy set. A smaller bubble means fewer people, like Chili’s or White Castle, and a large bubble means a lot of people, like McDonald’s, Taco Bell or Chick Fil-A.
I could make those bubbles correspond to a third dimension if I wanted to, but it would have to make sense. So let’s say I plotted speed versus quality and the size of the bubbles corresponded to value. Believe it or not, it’d actually look pretty similar to what I already have because value correlates pretty strongly with market share in my dummy data set.
But it would allow me to show three attributes instead of two in a single display. Neat, huh?
And that’s how perceptual mapping works. Again, if you want to try this for yourself, I’ve included a helpful video in the show notes, and if you can follow his instructions to make your own perceptual map using soda brands with data he supplies.
But if you’re interested in creating perceptual maps and don’t trust yourself to do the math, you are always welcome to contact me and ask for help! That’s not a sales pitch, by the way – I love helping people, and I’d be delighted to help you if you have a need!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
PLUG
This month I’m plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which is a not-for-profit organization that gathers and distributes food to over 500 food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and community program partners in the Greater St. Louis Area. This is a time of year when people are fighting not just the cold, but also the hunger that comes with higher heating bills, and supporting a food bank is a great way to have a powerful impact on your local community.
Over 40 million people in America struggle with food security and rely on government programs and charitable services to put food on their tables. Food banks are also facing more hardship than ever before due to operational strains from late 2025 due to the government shutdown and increased demand for assistance. They need us to step up and be donors and volunteers, and I encourage you to, at the very least, donate a few bucks today to help out.
While I always recommend supporting local food banks if you can, the St. Louis Area Foodbank is also a great choice because they provide so much support to so many organizations and are extremely transparent about how they utilize their funds. They have a perfect score on CharityNavigator and are an accredited charity with the Better Business Bureau and a partner with the United Way and Feeding America.
You can learn more at http://stlfoodbank.org/
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