Brand Mapping: See Where You Stand Before You Decide Where to Go

Brand mapping is the process of plotting your brand, and your competitors, across a set of axes that represent what actually matters to your customers. Done well, it shows you where the market is crowded, where it is open, and whether the position you think you hold is the position customers actually give you. It is one of the most commercially useful exercises in brand strategy, and one of the most commonly done badly.

Most brand maps end up as presentation slides rather than decision tools. The axes are vague, the competitor set is too polite, and the brand always ends up in a convenient white space. That is not mapping. That is wishful thinking with a grid on it.

What Is a Brand Map and What Is It Actually For?

A brand map is a visual representation of how brands in a category are perceived relative to each other, plotted across two or more dimensions. The most common format is a two-axis perceptual map: one dimension on the horizontal, one on the vertical, with brands plotted as points across the resulting grid.

The purpose is clarity. When you are making a positioning decision, a pricing decision, or a market entry decision, you need to understand the competitive landscape as customers experience it, not as your category manager describes it in a quarterly review. Brand mapping gives you a spatial view of that landscape.

I have sat in enough strategy sessions to know that most brands have a strong internal narrative about their own position. They know what they stand for, what makes them different, and where they sit relative to competitors. The problem is that this narrative is almost always built from the inside out. It reflects what the brand has invested in and what leadership believes, not necessarily what customers perceive. Brand mapping forces the outside-in view. That is its value.

If you want to go deeper on how brand mapping connects to the broader work of positioning, the brand strategy hub covers the full landscape, from archetype development to competitive differentiation.

What Are the Different Types of Brand Map?

Not all brand maps are the same, and the type you use should be driven by the question you are trying to answer.

Perceptual maps plot brands based on how customers perceive them. The axes represent perceptual attributes, things like “traditional vs. modern” or “accessible vs. premium,” and brand positions are determined by customer research. This is the most rigorous form of brand mapping because it is grounded in evidence rather than assumption.

Competitive positioning maps plot brands based on observable, objective criteria: price point, product range, distribution reach, service model. These are easier to construct because they do not require primary research, but they show you the competitive structure of the market, not how customers feel about it. The two are related but not identical.

Attribute maps go further by plotting multiple attributes simultaneously, often using techniques like correspondence analysis to show which brands are most strongly associated with which characteristics. These are more complex to build and harder to read, but they give you a richer picture of the perceptual landscape.

Customer experience maps are sometimes grouped under the brand mapping umbrella, but they serve a fundamentally different purpose. They show how customers move through a decision or experience, not how brands are positioned relative to each other. Conflating the two creates confusion. BCG’s research on customer experience is a useful reference point for understanding how perception and experience interact, but they are not the same thing and should not be mapped the same way.

How Do You Choose the Right Axes?

This is where most brand mapping exercises fall apart. The axes determine everything: what the map shows, what decisions it can support, and whether it is useful or decorative.

The axes need to meet two criteria. First, they must be dimensions that customers genuinely use to evaluate and differentiate brands in your category. Second, they must be independent of each other. If your two axes are correlated, you will get a map where all the brands cluster along a diagonal, which tells you almost nothing.

The most common mistake is choosing axes based on what the brand wants to be known for rather than what customers actually use to make choices. I have seen maps built on dimensions like “innovative” vs. “established” that looked compelling in a workshop but bore no relationship to how customers in that category were actually deciding. The map was measuring something real, but not something relevant.

Good axis selection usually comes from qualitative research: understanding the language customers use, the trade-offs they describe, and the attributes they mention without prompting. If you cannot point to customer evidence for why an axis belongs on your map, it probably does not.

There is also a practical consideration. The axes need to be actionable. If your brand cannot realistically move along a dimension, plotting your position on it is an academic exercise. The map should connect to decisions you can actually make.

How Do You Plot Brand Positions Accurately?

For a perceptual map, brand positions should come from customer data, not internal judgment. The standard approach is to survey a representative sample of your target market, ask them to rate each brand on the relevant attributes, and use those ratings to determine position on the map.

The rigour of this process matters more than most marketing teams acknowledge. When I was running the agency, we did positioning work for a financial services client who was convinced they occupied the “trusted, approachable” quadrant of their category. Their customer research told a different story. Customers rated them as trustworthy but not approachable, which placed them much closer to their most traditional competitor than they expected. That finding changed the brief for everything that followed.

If you do not have the budget or time for primary research, you can build a directional map from secondary sources: brand tracking data, review analysis, social listening, and category research. This is less precise but still more useful than plotting positions based on what the marketing team believes. The key discipline is being honest about what you are measuring and what you are not.

One thing worth noting: brand perception is not static. Consumer brand loyalty and perception shift, particularly in response to external pressures. A map built from research conducted two years ago may not reflect where brands stand today. Treat brand maps as time-stamped documents, not permanent records.

Who Should Be on the Map?

The competitor set is another area where bias creeps in. Brands tend to map the competitors they are most aware of, which is usually the set they have been competing against for years. This produces a map that reflects the category as it has been, not necessarily as it is or where it is heading.

A more useful approach is to define the competitor set from the customer’s perspective. Who are customers considering when they are making a decision in your category? Who do they mention when asked about alternatives? This sometimes surfaces competitors that the internal team has underweighted or dismissed, and it occasionally reveals that the real competitive threat is coming from outside the traditional category definition.

When we were doing positioning work across different sectors, one of the most instructive exercises was expanding the competitor set beyond the obvious names. In one case, a B2B software client was mapping themselves against three direct competitors and missing the fact that a consulting firm was eating a significant portion of their addressable market by solving the same problem with a different model. That firm was not on their map. It should have been.

There is also a question of how many brands to include. Too few and the map does not show the full competitive context. Too many and it becomes unreadable. As a working rule, include every brand that a meaningful proportion of your target customers would consider, and no more.

What Does White Space on a Brand Map Actually Mean?

White space on a brand map is often treated as an automatic signal of opportunity. If no competitor is positioned in a particular quadrant, the logic goes, there must be room to move there and own it. This is one of the more persistent misconceptions in brand strategy.

White space can mean several things. It can mean there is genuine unmet demand in that part of the perceptual space, which is the optimistic interpretation. It can also mean that customers do not value that combination of attributes, that the position is technically difficult to occupy credibly, or that competitors have tried and failed there. Before treating white space as an opportunity, you need to understand why it is empty.

The test is whether there is a customer need that the white space addresses. If you can point to a segment of customers who are underserved by the current competitive set and who would respond to a brand positioned in that space, then it is a real opportunity. If the white space is just a gap in the visual representation without a corresponding gap in customer need, moving into it will not generate commercial return.

Wistia’s analysis of why brand building strategies fail touches on a related point: brands that chase differentiation for its own sake, rather than differentiation that connects to what customers actually want, tend to end up in positions that are distinctive but commercially irrelevant. White space thinking, done carelessly, produces exactly that outcome.

How Does Brand Mapping Connect to Positioning Decisions?

A brand map is a diagnostic, not a strategy. It tells you where you are. It does not tell you where to go or how to get there. This distinction matters because the map can generate false confidence: if you have plotted your position and identified a desirable space to move into, it can feel like the positioning work is done. It is not.

Moving a brand’s position on a perceptual map requires sustained investment in the signals that drive perception: communications, product experience, pricing, distribution, and the behaviour of the organisation itself. Consistency in brand voice and communication is one of the more controllable levers, but it is one lever among many, and it works slowly.

The map should inform the positioning brief by showing the team what distance needs to be covered, in which direction, and what the competitive context looks like along that path. If the desired position is close to a well-established competitor, the strategy needs to account for that. If it requires the brand to move along a dimension where it has no current credibility, the strategy needs to address how that credibility will be built.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, which gave me a useful vantage point on what effective positioning work actually looks like in practice. The campaigns that performed best commercially were almost never the ones that had found the cleverest white space. They were the ones where the brand had a clear understanding of its current position, a realistic view of where it could credibly move, and a strategy that connected those two points in a way that was meaningful to customers. The map was a starting point, not the answer.

BCG’s work on brand strategy and go-to-market alignment makes a similar point: brand positioning decisions need to be connected to the commercial and organisational realities of the business, not treated as a separate creative exercise. A brand map that sits in a strategy deck and never informs a product, pricing, or communications decision has not done its job.

What Are the Practical Limits of Brand Mapping?

Brand mapping is a useful tool with real limitations, and being clear about those limitations is part of using it well.

Two-dimensional maps are a simplification of a perceptual landscape that is genuinely multidimensional. Customers do not evaluate brands on two axes. They evaluate them on dozens of attributes simultaneously, many of which are contextual, emotional, and not easily captured in survey ratings. The map is an approximation, and it should be treated as one.

Brand maps also tend to reflect average perceptions across a market, which can mask important variation between segments. A brand that appears to occupy a clear position on an aggregate map may be perceived very differently by different customer groups. If your strategy is targeting a specific segment, you want a map that reflects how that segment perceives the category, not how the whole market does.

There is also a temporal problem. Brand maps are snapshots. They capture perception at a point in time, and perception changes. New entrants reshape the competitive landscape. Brand communications shift associations. External events change what attributes customers care about. A map that was accurate twelve months ago may be misleading today. Building the habit of refreshing brand maps on a regular cadence, rather than treating them as fixed references, is more useful than any single map exercise.

Finally, brand maps measure perception, not behaviour. A brand can be perceived positively on all the right dimensions and still lose market share if the customer experience does not deliver on the perceptual promise, if distribution is weak, or if pricing is misaligned. Brand loyalty research consistently shows that perception and behaviour are related but not identical. The map is one input into a commercial picture, not the whole picture.

Brand mapping is one of the foundational tools in the positioning toolkit. If you want to understand how it connects to the broader discipline of brand strategy, including how positioning decisions get made and communicated, the brand positioning and archetypes hub brings together the full range of strategic frameworks we cover at The Marketing Juice.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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