Visually Representing Consumer Perceptions : Issues and Managerial Insights

Perceptual maps and trees are widely used for business applications like advertising development, product design and product positioning. Maps and trees are however intrinsically different in terms of how well they can represent consumer perceptions of product‐market structure. Draws on recent advances in the academic literature to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of maps and trees. This theoretical evaluation is used to develop a grid‐based framework which is then used to provide guidelines to managers about what kind of visual representation to use, and what type of input data to collect, for some different real‐life marketing tasks. This conceptual framework is also used to indicate directions for future academic research in the area of visual representation models.