hi there let's take a quick look at a concept that is a really useful way of helping to determine how a business or a brand positions itself in the market it's called the positioning or Market map now a market or positioning map as it's often called is really all about using some judgment perhaps based on Market Research to help place a variety of different brands or businesses in terms of how they try to compete and the way the app works is that it takes two dimensions and then tries to judge where each of those Brands fit in terms of the choices made for those Dimensions now those could be a variety of things perhaps the most popular choice of Dimension is the difference between a low price all the way up to the highest prices in the market and often of course we might judge the positioning or the perceived positioning of a of a of a product in terms of its quality from uh the most basic quality all the way up to the highest quality but of course it could be a variety of other dimensions it could be whether it's a high volume or low volume uh Market whether the product is perceived as a necessity all the way up to luxury and so on so you can see how there are a variety of different dimensions a market map might use and to a large extent this really determines how you end up using the analysis well here's an example let's just build a market mapup just to show you in action I've mentioned it's a two-dimensional model so we need to have two Dimensions against which to map some products or Brands and what we'll do is we'll pick perhaps the most common one which is price we use that for the horizontal axis there low price on the left all the way to high price on the right and in terms of vertical I'm going to take an example from the service industry and I'm going to try to uh Market map a variety of businesses in terms of whether they offer quite a wide range or broad range of services all the way down to a fairly narrow range of services and the seor I'll take is one that is uh may be maybe familiar to you it's the health and fitness club Market just to show you and illustrate how the market Map works well there we go there's our Market map it doesn't yet have any brands or businesses positions on it so let's start adding one or two in the top right hand corner I'm looking for a business that sets particularly high prices by offering perhaps the widest range of Premium services and certainly virgin active with its premium collection is right up there positioned as being a high price but high value adding health and fitness brand and quite a similar business in the UK Market at least is one called David Lloyd which has around 7980 um health and fitness clubs around Europe but again he positioned as offering a very War a very wide range of services at a relatively high price you have to call them to find out what the price is now over on the left in the left hand quadrant a slightly different Business nfield Health which which actually also offers a much broader range of services than many gyms and fitness clubs but has a more Health orientation uh but certainly a lower price uh for many of its customers than DAV Lloyd and virgin active let's put to want two more on the map balentine's Health Club Duncan balentine's uh Health Club and Spa business is might be might be argued to be midmarket um probably a mid-range price for its uh monthly contracts and subscriptions and it offers a fairly broad range of services certainly not a a No Frill service but maybe not as much as virgin active but then let's also populate the bottom left and quadrant as well as the bottom right now Fitness First uh you might argue has a relatively uncompetitive position there because it's offering a relatively low range or narrow range of services for a relatively high price I wonder whether that's sustainable perhaps it might need to try to move into the top right hand quadrant to compete particularly because it's facing increasing competition from the likes of pure gy and the gym group the two largest Fitness groups in the UK now which have built a very successful model a fast growing model based around a very narrow range of services essentially exercise equipment and classes but for a very low price and uh highly flexible contracts must pay as you go gym usage so you can see from that diagram it's possible using the two dimensions that we picked here to paint a map a market positioning map of the health and fitness market now you might agree or disagree with where we've positioned those but uh that's not really the point it's all about you having a go for a market of your of your choosing perhaps by using some different dimensions as well now in terms of Market mapping just a quick word about how useful these things are clearly they're going to be very useful if you get the right dimensions because it may identify a possible Gap in the market where uh there isn't yet a brand or a business that appears to have met customer needs and wants and it's a widely used uh tool for competitor analysis particularly if it's based around some sensible and perhaps reliable market research how of course the the downsides or the drawbacks with Market mapping are first of all uh it's based on judgment it could be based on Research which perhaps out of date and of course just because there appears to be no businesses in a particular quadrant of the map doesn't necessarily mean that there's a business opportunity there there could be some good reason why nobody else is tried to position themselves in that part of the map so there we go guys a very brief and hopefully useful overview of this concept called the market or positioning map