Market Structure Analysis is a powerful market diagnostic tool that The Strategy Group has successfully employed on many occasions in situations when our clients are developing strategies for introducing new products, repositioning existing products, or identifying gaps in the marketplace with strong sales potential.
Market Structure Analysis provides our clients with several key strategic marketing insights:
The foundation of market structure analysis is a visual representation of the market place referred to as a "perceptual map". A perceptual mapping of your product category reveals where your brand lies relative to competitors, which brands represent the greatest threat to your market share and, in what direction your brand should be moved for the greatest increases in market share.
Brands perceived as having similar images lie close to each other and those seen as being different are further apart.
Conventional perceptual mapping techniques typically stop here and provide no information about how the client's brand should be upgraded or repositioned for maximum share growth. The Strategy Group improves upon these conventional methods by including in our analysis the ability to generate market segments based on "need preferences", thereby establishing an association between "unfulfilled" needs and brand performance. Clients are now in a position to simulate different marketing scenarios to see how the market would respond to different positioning strategies.