Brand mapping

Brand mapping is a questionnaire that encompasses a list of attributes, a list of brands, and questions for customers. It helps companies evaluate how good they are in terms of innovations, trustworthiness, and pricing compared to competitors and figure out how clients and prospects perceive their businesses and products.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of brand mapping and the steps necessary to map your brand.

Why is brand mapping important?

Brand mapping is a source of valuable information for marketers. By creating a visual display of data, you can gain customer insights that will help you with the further marketing strategy. First of all, you can reveal how potential and current customers perceive your brand. Secondly, you can unveil what consumers think or feel about your competitors. With brand mapping, you can identify your main rivals and understand their competitive advantage. Besides, you can visually outline your strengths and weaknesses. Once you map your brand, you can improve your position in those fields in which you are superior to your competitors and improve those in which there are shortcomings.

If you have average results, you can revise your marketing strategy and message. Do research to find out what makes consumers satisfied or unsatisfied with your business. After you do it, you’ll understand which areas to improve and how to make your company stand out. For example, if prospective customers assume that your company is less reliable than competitors, find out the reason. Analyze these rivals to figure out what they do to earn people’s trust. Once you eliminate the problem, consumers will have a different perception.

With a brand map, you’ll have a clear picture of your company, know your competitors, and how customers perceive them. As a result, you’ll have an opportunity to change a strategy to reach customers and hook their attention, earn trust, or become an industry leader. You’ll also get some valuable data about your brand positioning.

Now that you know the importance, it’s time to unveil how to map your brand.

How to map your brand?

There are several mandatory steps you should perform to do the brand mapping. You can develop a brand map as a part of bigger research or create it separately. We’ve prepared a list of to-dos to achieve the necessary results.

1. Write a list of rivals. You should identify the number and names of competitors you want to analyze in line with your brand. Choose around 5-8 competitors to have a comprehensive analysis and customer insights into your brand and rivals.
2. Prepare a list of attributes for companies. Choose for which areas of your business you need customer insights. After, select attributes that will help consumers answer your questions. 8-10 attributes would be perfect.
3. Get ready with the right questions. To get essential insights into consumer behavior, you should relate your questions to attributes. For instance, if you have a “reliable” attribute, you can ask respondents to assess the reliability level of each brand, including yours. Your customers should evaluate companies on the list by using a 100 point scale.
4. Make sure you have at least 200 responses. To have a clear picture of your company compared to competitors, you need to have a minimum of 200 answers from clients. Ideally, you need to collect 1,000 responses. This way, you’ll have a list of associations related to your business.
5. Process information. Once you gather all answers, you need to analyze the data you have. You can find out how positively customers perceive your brand, whether they think it’s reliable, trustworthy, quality, affordable, etc. Use information about your competitors to make some innovations and improvements to make people feel happier with your company.

Brand mapping will come in handy when you don’t know what you are doing right and wrong. It’ll serve you as a source of valuable information about your customers.