Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 8.6 
Perceptual map of 
leisure centres
Woburn
Safari
Park
S
American
Adventure
A
T
Alton
Towers
Belton
House
B
Chatsworth
House
Warwick
Castle
C
W

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QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES TO POSITIONING RESEARCH
● 
for all the family;
● 
synthetic/artificial;
● 
good food.
Kelly grids are a popular marketing research technique that could also have been used to 
identify the dimensions underlying the perceptual map. For these grids a four-step approach 
is typically taken:
1 
Respondents are presented with three stimuli (in our case, three leisure attractions) and 
asked to state one way in which two of them are alike and yet different from the third.
2 
The criteria on which the two were said to be alike (say ‘noisy’) is labelled ‘the emergent 
pole’ and associated dissimilarity (say ‘quiet’) is labelled ‘the implicit pole’.
3 
The remaining stimuli (leisure attractions) are then sorted equally between the two poles.
4 
Another three stimuli are selected and the process is repeated until the respondent can 
think of no new reasons why the triad are alike or dissimilar.
To find how the dimensions fit the perceptual map in Figure 8.6, respondents were asked 
to rank each of the leisure facilities on the basis of the attributes identified. Once again, the 
result is a series of matrices that are difficult to analyse manually but, once again, software 
comes to our aid. In this case a package called PREFMAP was used. This takes the percep-
tual map of product positions in Figure 8.6 and fits the dimensions as they best describe the 
respondents’ perceptions. To identify the meaning of these vectors, each one can be traced 
back through the centre of the perceptual map (see Figure 8.7).
The score of each of the leisure centres (stimuli) on the dimension (vector) is measured by 
their relative position as the vector is traced back through the centre. For instance, the respond-
ents saw Chatsworth House as being the most ‘sophisticated’ (on the east–west dimension), 
followed by Warwick Castle, Woburn Safari Park, Belton House, American Adventure and 
Alton Towers. In almost complete opposition to sophistication was the vector representing 
noisy and rowdy, on which Alton Towers and American Adventure scored highest. Projecting 
back the vector that represents a strong theme showed the highest-scoring leisure centre to be 
Woburn Safari Park, followed by the American Adventure and Warwick Castle with an almost 
equal rating, and finally Belton House, Alton Towers and Chatsworth House. Once again, it 
is likely that respondents’ individual or aggregated scores are not perfectly represented by the