Reference: Xu 2021. Brand/Product Positioning & Perceptual Mapping. Rpubs.com/utjimmyx/brand_positioning

Think-pair-share

The final perceptual maps (see Figures 3 and 4) are designed to explain the impact of a college degree on people’s perception of grocery stores.

Figure 3 represents consumers who have a college degree.

Figure 4 represents consumers who do not have a college degree.

Please try to

#Interpret any differences between these two groups of consumers’ perceptions toward grocery stores in Bakersfield:

Customers without college degrees have a bigger impact on pricing, discounts and value, while customers with college degrees may put more importance on convenience, product quality and customer service. However, because of to the smaller sample size, those differences should be viewed as overall patterns rather than generalizations for all Bakersfield consumers.

#Suggest any other variables that might be included

Other factors are age, income, shopping frequency, cleanliness of the store, selection of goods, customer service, parking, loyalty cards, and online ordering. These factors may help show why people prefer certain grocery stores over others.

#Suggest what a particular grocery store manager should do to make data-informed marketing strategies.

A grocery shop management needs to use the perceptual map to assess the store’s strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors. For example, if customers now perceive the store a certain way, management can provide more coupons and discounts and convenience.

#Suggest any changes you would like to make to your own survey questionnaire. How?

Questions I would add into my survey are things such as age, income, how often they purchase, cleanliness of the business, customer service, online shopping. I would also survey a lot more people.

Objectives

After this workshop/exercise, you will have a better understanding of how to develop a perceptual mapping for brand/product positioning purposes using either survey data or qualitative data.

In addition, you will also try to learn how to design basic perceptual mapping questions for survey studies.

Tips

Data Generation Procedures

The first step is to collect your data. In this example, we collected Qualtrics survey data for the local groceries in Bakersfield, CA using a focus group. You may try to evaluate the attributes based on your group members’ perceptions of your project client’s business and the competition.

If you would like to follow my tutorial, I suggest that you think about using at least three attributes and follow the same data format (Columns:attributes; 1st Row: brands or products). Please open my sample data and see how it looks like.

Data Pre-processing

In this exercise, we first calculate consumers’ average ratings for each attribute and then split the original survey dataset into two according to the education variable (1 and 0). The final datasets used for this analysis include those consumers who have at least a college degree (i.e., Bakersfield_Grocery1.csv) and those not (i.e., Bakersfield_Grocery2.csv).

Interpreting the results - What does a Perceptual Map tell you?

The final output shows you how different grocery brands have been clustered in four quadrants to reflect how they are perceived in terms of several service attributes (Yelp Reviews, Convenience, Price or value, etc.).

Data Analysis and Reporting - Understanding the perceptions of consumers who have a college degree

library(devtools) 
## Loading required package: usethis
install_github("vqv/ggbiplot")
## Warning: `install_github()` was deprecated in devtools 2.5.0.
## ℹ Please use pak::pak("user/repo") instead.
## This warning is displayed once per session.
## Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
## generated.
## Skipping install of 'ggbiplot' from a github remote, the SHA1 (f7ea76da) has not changed since last install.
##   Use `force = TRUE` to force installation
library(ggbiplot)
## Loading required package: ggplot2
## Loading required package: plyr
## Loading required package: scales
## Loading required package: grid
?ggbiplot  #see the official introduction to this library

data <- read.csv("Bakersfield_Grocery1.csv", header=TRUE, row.names=1)

site.groups <- c(rep("a", 3), rep("b", 3),
                 rep("c", 3))
data.pca <- prcomp(data[,-1], scale. = TRUE)
data.pca <- prcomp(data, scale. = TRUE)
ggbiplot(data.pca, labels =  rownames(data))

g1 <- ggbiplot(data.pca, obs.scale = 1, var.scale = 1, 
              groups = site.groups, 
              ellipse = TRUE, circle = TRUE, labels =  rownames(data))
## Warning: Using `size` aesthetic for lines was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0.
## ℹ Please use `linewidth` instead.
## ℹ The deprecated feature was likely used in the ggbiplot package.
##   Please report the issue to the authors.
## This warning is displayed once per session.
## Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
## generated.
g1 <- g1 + scale_color_discrete(name = '')
g1 <- g1 + theme(legend.direction = 'horizontal', 
               legend.position = 'top')
print(g1)

Data Analysis and Reporting - Understanding the perceptions of consumers who do not have a college degree

library(devtools) 

library(ggbiplot)

data <- read.csv("Bakersfield_Grocery2.csv", header=TRUE, row.names=1)

site.groups <- c(rep("a", 3), rep("b", 3),
                 rep("c", 3))
data.pca <- prcomp(data[,-1], scale. = TRUE)
data.pca <- prcomp(data, scale. = TRUE)
ggbiplot(data.pca, labels =  rownames(data))

g2 <- ggbiplot(data.pca, obs.scale = 1, var.scale = 1, 
              groups = site.groups, 
              ellipse = TRUE, circle = TRUE, labels =  rownames(data))

g2 <- g2 + scale_color_discrete(name = '')
g2 <- g2 + theme(legend.direction = 'horizontal', 
               legend.position = 'top')
print(g2)

QUESTION 1 ANSWER:

Other characteristics include age, income, how often they purchase, store cleanliness, product quality, customer service, discounts and online ordering options. Those aspects might explain why some shoppers are loyal to certain grocery stores .

QUESTION 2 ANSWER:

The perceptual map can help a grocery shop management in determining the strengths and weaknesses of their store in comparison with their competitors. For example, if the customers think that the store is expensive the manager might give them more discounts or if they think it is bad quality they might advertise better products.

QUESTION 3:

I used the article How The Perception Of A Good Brand Helps Your Company’s Effectiveness - In this article I found some key principles that could be related to my future career in social media marketing. Brand effectiveness is more important than people realize, it’s about connecting with your market/ customers not just putting commercials out there. Social media allows people to feel connected to the brand. The company is able to see the peoples input and respond making the experience feel more personal. I also saw that solely having a positive social media can influence people and create this sense of trust. This is so important because the brand has to stick to their core values while also targeting their audience in the correct way. Last and most importantly, the article explains how customer perception can play a major role in the company’s success. That being said social media managers should be tracking reviews, comments, and engagement daily to keep up with the comapnys perception.