Marketing communication: principles and practice

PERCEPTUAL (COGNITIVE) MAPPING
This is a widely used technique to engage brand designers and consumers/
buyers in surfacing the bases for their judgements about a brand.
People are asked to identify the characteristics and features of goods and
services and their providers, and then to compare a brand with competing
brands. For example, coffee brands may be compared on a cost dimension
(cheap–expensive) and a flavour dimension (mellow–strong). Quality and
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cost are often discriminators. Some complex mapping has three (or more)
dimensions because consumers consider multiple characteristics, but this is
impossible to illustrate clearly here on a flat page, so we have limited the
example to the more usual two dimensions. Where would you locate (map)
your course? How would you know where to locate other courses you could
take? Perhaps this tells us something about how a brand might work? What
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Self-expression
Prestige products show that the user or purchaser is
somehow different, e.g. Daimler, Rolls Royce, Rolex, Gucci,
Armani, etc. 
Simplicity
Product choices are simplified in a cluttered marketplace.
Apple Computers, for example, dropped technical jargon,
behaving in a consumer-friendly fashion to provide practical
solutions
Quality
A brand can convey a sense of quality, benefits, and value
for money as a shorthand to past experiences – trust is a
mediator for present and future purchase choices
Choice
Purchasers can discriminate between offers
Risk avoidance
Buying well-known or reputable product offers less risk than
buying an unknown product – there is some assurance that it
will live up to expectations