Jory MacKay on March 18, 2025 How to use a perceptual map to better understand your users
One of the worst things that can happen to a leader or founder is losing touch with your actual users. Unfortunately, a famous study from Bain & Co found that, while 80% of CEOs think they deliver a “superior experience” to their customers, only 8% of their real customers actually agree!
While this study is nearly 20 years old, to this day, many modern product teams miss the mark when it comes to connecting their product roadmap to real user needs.
So, how do you bridge the gap between your beliefs and users’ real needs? Perceptual mapping.
A perceptual map visualizes how a product or brand is perceived by its target audience, highlighting how it scores on key attributes and how it compares with competitors.
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These maps have provided critical insights for marketing teams for years, but can also be used to help product teams better prioritize their feature lists.
What is a perceptual map?
A perceptual map is a visualization of how a product or brand is perceived by its target audience, highlighting how it scores on key attributes and how those scores compare with competitors.
Typically, a perceptual map uses a two-axis scatter chart to show a detailed comparison of two critical attributes. For example, the x-axis might measure customers’ perceived quality, while the y-axis measures cost.
This two-axis view not only provides a rich comparison, but also creates an “at-a-glance” picture of different players in any particular industry. For this reason, it’s been a popular tool for many brand, marketing, and advertising teams for several decades.
Unfortunately, most products or brands are far more nuanced than any two metrics can explain on their own.
That’s why conceptual maps should always be used alongside other forms of insights, such as:
- User interviews
- Customer feedback surveys
- Competitive analysis
- Brand trackers
- Online reviews
- Focus groups
Why should product teams care about perceptual mapping?
While marketing and advertising teams commonly use perceptual mapping, they’re also great for product managers looking to gain a more in-depth understanding of their user’s thoughts, behaviors, and needs.
Here are some of the key insights product teams can gain by using perceptual mapping:
- Gain a better understanding of industry trends. The process of creating a perceptual map forces you to take a deeper look at where your industry is now and where it might be headed in the future. This can help product teams get ahead of the competition and create new and exciting features or tools that customers will be asking for in the near future.
- Translate user interviews into larger themes. Perceptual maps are a great way to aggregate a high volume of user data into broader, strategic themes. For example, a perceptual map that links customer satisfaction and feature sets can clearly show what users love most about a product.
- Helps identify where your product is lacking vs. competitors. Perceptual maps do an outstanding job of highlighting where you are versus your competitors in key metrics. Where competitive analysis can become complex and detailed, a conceptual map is clear and easy to understand.
- Uncover gaps in the market that your product could address. Areas where competitors outrank you also show gaps that you and your product team could address in the future. It’s easy to think of this as just new features, but it could also uncover improvements in customer service, support, onboarding, or interface design.
- Create stronger collaboration between product and marketing teams. Product and marketing teams can sometimes point the finger at each other when things don’t go right. Perceptual maps are great levelers, helping both teams come together and identify ways to improve user perception together.
- Reset your product’s positioning strategy. Overall, perceptual maps are a great tool to help you set your overall product positioning strategy. Bringing together user needs, competitor insights, current weaknesses, and areas of opportunity gives you everything you need to set your product strategy and plan your roadmap for the future.
The two types of perceptual maps (and when to use them)
There’s no single right way to create a perceptual map. Depending on your needs, industry, and data, you’ll probably choose between two different types of maps: two-dimensional and multidimensional perceptual maps.
Let’s take a look at each in turn, what makes them unique, and when you might use them.
1. Two-dimensional perceptual map
As illustrated above, a two-dimensional perceptual map compares two key attributes, showing a clear view of how products or brands rank against their competitors.
They’re by far the most popular perceptual map format as they’re easy to create and understand, but they’re not without their limitations.
Two-dimensional perceptual maps are often used for:
- Analyzing social media campaigns
- Comparing advertising strategies
- Understanding brand perception
- Comparing attributes of a product’s features
Note: A single two-dimensional perceptual map probably won’t be enough. Most companies and teams create multiple maps to compare across different qualities.
2. Multidimensional perceptual map
Multidimensional perceptual maps plot products or brands against several attributes, helping to create a richer picture of customer opinion, and how your product or brand compares against competitors.
Whereas two-dimensional maps follow a standard layout, multidimensional maps follow many formats, but often list attributes around in a circle and plot data points accordingly.
While they do provide more in-depth information, they can be confusing, so are often only used for:
- Broader market research
- New product launches
- Competitive analysis
- Innovation and strategy sessions
How to create a perceptual map in 6 steps
Perceptual maps can be basic and straightforward or more complex, comparing different products across multiple characteristics and qualities. However, the process for perceptual mapping is pretty much always the same.
Here’s how to start creating perceptual maps for your brand or product today:
Step 1. Understand why you need a perceptual map
Before jumping into gathering data and building a perceptual map, it’s important to step back and understand what you’re trying to achieve.
This will help set the foundation for the rest of the process, underpinning the type of perceptual map you need, the data items you’ll capture, and how you’ll share your map with the team.
Use case examples include:
- A marketing project management team may want to create a perceptual map to uncover customer’s opinion of their Christmas TV advertisement.
- Strategy teams may want to use a perceptual map to identify a gap in the market for a new financial services offering.
- Advertising teams may want to understand customer’s thoughts on multiple different new social media campaign ideas.
- Product teams may want to understand customer’s opinions and buying intentions to help them prioritize new features in their mobile app.
While 80% of CEOs think they deliver a “superior experience” to their customers, only 8% of their real customers actually agree!
Step 2. Define the attributes your customers care about
Once your goals and objectives are defined, it’s time to decide what parameters to use in your perceptual maps. For those wanting to compare many attributes, you can either use a multidimensional map, or multiple two-dimensional maps to keep things a little simpler.
Here it’s important to use attributes that actually matter to your customer. Whether something is red or blue may not matter as much as if it costs $100 or $1000. Make sure you’re using determinant attributes (those that determine a user’s buying decision!)
Some use case examples include:
- A marketing team may compare whether their Christmas TV advertisement was memorable vs. forgettable, and personal vs. impersonal.
- A new propositions team may compare a new chocolate bar based on it being cheap vs. expensive or healthy vs. unhealthy.
- Advertising teams may ask their audience to rate their new social media campaign ideas on whether they were modern vs. old-fashioned and creative vs. predictable.
- A product team looking to prioritize new features may compare whether each one is user-friendly vs. complicated, and valuable vs. invaluable.
Step 3. Identify your competitors (both direct and indirect)
For a perceptual map to be effective, you need to show how you rank against those around you. Whether you’re comparing a specific product, service, deliverable, or your broader brand, identify both direct and indirect competitors that operate in your industry or market.
Some points to consider:
- Select a diverse range of competitors, including larger established names and up-and-coming startups.
- Include everyone, even those competitors you know may score more favorably on the attributes that matter.
- Get outside help to identify competitors, as you may have a blind spot for new entrants or those who offer a different mix of services.
Step 4. Collect your customer insights
With your attributes and competitors selected, you have everything you need to begin collecting the supporting data from users. You may choose to do this yourself, or use the services of a market research agency to assist you, with an impartial third party a great option to ensure you get unbiased feedback.
Depending on the size of your project, product, and market, it’s also worth thinking of the sample size, as the more data you collect, the more accurate your perceptual map will be.
This is where a project management tool like Planio can come in handy. Planio allows you to create internal Wikis and projects to track and share your research across teams — making it accessible to anyone who wants to use it to create their own perceptual map.
Some use case examples include:
- A marketing team may use a quick survey to gain a high volume of respondents on their Christmas TV advertisement map.
- A new propositions team may complete focus groups to get an in-depth understanding of chocolate bar preferences.
- Advertising teams may ask direct messages to their audience with a quick poll to help them understand which social media campaigns resonate with their audience.
- A product team looking to prioritize new features may complete user questionnaires with the existing customer base to gain in depth feedback.
Step 5. Map the data into your map (or maps)
No matter how you collect your data, once you have a decent sample size, you need to plot it onto your perceptual map(s).
To achieve this, align your axis scales with the questions and scoring that you’ve gathered, and consider whether you plot the data onto one map, or use a series of maps to clearly show different comparison points.
Some ways to break big maps down include:
- You may create one map for direct competitors and one map for indirect competitors.
- You may create a map for each key attribute pairing, e.g., price/quality, usability/value.
- Create a range of simpler, two-dimensional maps to support a more complex multidimensional map.
Step 6. Analyze the results as a team and take action
The true value of a perceptual map is what you do with it once you have the results. Armed with one (or many) perceptual maps, get your team together to discuss the results, identify trends, and plan actions for the future.
As your project or product develops, you may go on to create a second version of your perceptual maps, plotting any changes that occur over time. This will help you assess whether your actions have been successful or not.
Here’s how Planio can help:
- Perceptual maps are a great resource for many business departments, so use tools like Planio to store, share, and collaborate on your work.
- Features such as the Wiki, File Share, and Team Chat all come together to enable teams to collaborate, helping you keep all of your ideas and actions together in one place.
- Research and insight can quickly be turned into tasks, added to ongoing projects, and tracked from idea to final result!
Best practices for successful perceptual mapping
Before you jump head first into creating your first perceptual map, consider these best practices to help you get the most out of them and avoid some common mistakes:
- Be realistic about your positioning. Many people create perceptual maps hoping they’ll only show good news. In many instances, perceptual maps highlight areas of improvement and indicate gaps between business perceptions and customer opinion. Prepare for that in advance to avoid disgruntled stakeholders.
- Use determinant attributes. These are attributes that actually matter to users, often driving a genuine preference from one brand, tool, or product to another.
- Watch out for middle-markers. If products or brands constantly appear in the middle of a map, it could be a sign that customers have limited awareness and are fudging the numbers. Human behavior shows that when we’re unsure, we default to a middle score, to avoid feeling that we’re being overly harsh to those we’re scoring.
- Perceptual maps are best used over time. It can be easy to do one perceptual map, save it in your document storage, and rely on it for years to come. The best perceptual maps are those that are kept up-to-date and tracked over time, helping you identify trends but also get ahead of user’s perceptual changes before they manifest into lost customers and reduced revenue.
Final thoughts: The best product teams study their customers
Data shows that our perception of what customers think of our products rarely matches reality. Perceptual maps are great at closing this gap, helping to understand and visualize what customers think of you, and your competitors, on a range of key product or brand attributes.
While perceptual maps are commonly used in marketing and advertising, they’re great for product teams too, helping them get closer to their users to understand the features they really want.
Creating your first perceptual map is actually a fairly straightforward process that can be made even easier by using tools such as Planio. We can help you bring your entire team together to plan, share, and collaborate on your perceptual maps, meaning you reap the benefits of understanding what your users really think of your product!
Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)
