ABSTRACT
What is perceptual mapping? In its marketing application, the term means a technique used to graphically represent the position of a particular offering in terms of all the other offerings in a specific category of products or services. There are generally two goals in mind when managers have perceptual maps drawn. The first is to determine where the offering is positioned with respect to the com petitive offerings. The second is to help identify product or service attributes which are important to customers and which can be used to differentiate one company's offering from the others in the cate gory. No matter how important a particular attribute may be in the customer's mind, unless the customer perceives differences across offerings, then that attribute will not be influential in customer 's decisions when faced with choosing among alternatives . Frequently, the attributes which customers fmd important are latent, and often unobservable (or, usually, are deemed unimportant) by manage ment; perceptual mapping helps in the essential task of uncovering these latent dimensions and making them and their importance more apparent to all concerned.
