An interactive program for making perceptual maps…
PERCEPTUAL MAPPING is a diagrammatic technique used by asset marketers that attempts to
visually display the perceptions of customers or potential customers. Typically the position of a company's
product, product line, or brand is displayed relative to their competition. Perceptual maps, also known as
market maps, usually have two dimensions but can be multi-dimensional; they can be used to identify gaps in
the market and potential partners or merger targets as well as to clarify perceptual problems with a company's
product.
PERMAP is a program that uses multidimensional scaling (MDS) to reduce multiple pair wise
relationships to 2-D pictures, commonly called perceptual maps. PERMAP is a free, Windows-based, real-time
interactive program for making perceptual maps (also called product maps, strategic maps, sociograms,
sociometric maps, psychometric maps, stimulus-response maps, relationship maps, concept maps, etc.). Its
fundamental purpose is to uncover any "hidden structure" that might be residing in a complex data set.
USES: – Perceptual mapping enables companies to better understand their customers: the who,
why, where, how and what of their behavior. If a business is perceived in a manner they find unsatisfactory,
further research then identifies what can be done to change that. Perceptual mapping also allows businesses to
see what consumers think of other brands, particularly their competitors. Perceptual mapping can help define
market segments, showing clusters of businesses differentiated by key aspects (such as higher class or number
of restaurants). It can also help identify gaps in a market where a new product or service could be introduced.
PURPOSE OF PERMAP: -The use of MDS for the construction of perceptual maps is well
developed and several computer programs are available. In fact, MDS was one of the earliest uses of high-speed
computers in psychology and the social sciences. The purpose of PERMAP is to provide a particularly
convenient method of producing perceptual maps and to do so in a way that helps the researcher avoid a number
of common mistakes. PERMAP has been specifically designed to expose problems associated with local
minima. If you have worked with MDS but have not discovered the high probability of the occurrence of
results that are controlled by local minima then you need to experiment with PERMAP. This problem is well
documented in the literature but too often is ignored by new users. The problem is not solved by using
rationalized starting points. You have to experiment with real-time analyses, using real data, to really
understand it. See the PERMAP operation manual for more information on this important point.
HOW PERMAP WOKS: -PERMAP takes object-to- object proximity values (also called
similarities, dissimilarities, correlations, distances, interactions, psychological distances, dependencies,
confusabilities, preferences, joint or conditional probabilities, etc.), or up to 30 object attribute values which can
be used to calculate one of the forgoing types of proximities, and uses multidimensional scaling (MDS) to make
a map that shows the relationships between the objects. Succinctly, PERMAP makes classical metric and
nonmetric MDS analyses in one, two, three, … or eight dimensions, for one-mode two-way or two-mode two-
way data, with up to 1000 objects and with missing values allowed. Ignoring jargon, PERMAP makes all the
common types of MDS analyses. In addition, it can make several new types of MDS analyses involving error
bounds or boundary conditions, and it can show the affect of degrading the proximity (similarity) information.
PERMAP's main claim-to- fame is that it lets you drag-and- drop objects in and out of the active set while the
map is evolving and being displayed. It also allows complete on-line control of the badness function, distance
metric, attributes-to- proximities formula, attribute set composition, mapping weights, and metric or nonmetric
MDS, again, while the solution is running and the developing map is being displayed. The solution can be
mirrored, rotated, translated, or zoomed. The bottom line is that PERMAP gives you more real-time control
over your solution than any other MDS program. It lets you get a "feel" for the solution and it lets you see,
immediately, the changes that occur if you change any of your assumptions.
MDS: – Traditional perceptual maps are built with two visual dimensions (X and Y axis).
Multidimensional perceptual maps are built with more dimensions visualized as profile charts in small map
regions, and then items are mapped to the regions by their similarity to the vectors that represent the region. A
common technique to construct this kind of multidimensional perceptual maps is the self-organizing map. This
helps pinpoint more variables, allowing for more in-depth research into what influences the consumer. This
means that the perceptual map can be applied beyond low-involvement purchases, and also helps with
identification of segments in a market. A major advantage of MDS and perceptual maps is that they deal with
problems associated with substantiating and communicating results based on data involving more than two
dimensions.
