Perceptual Mapping for Agricultural Marketing Research: Concept and Methodologies

Abstract

In the agriculture the focus was more on the production of commodity than marketing of it. In the wake of the focus on doubling the income of farmers one of the strategies can be the direct marketing of the produce. It may be possible through the market research, which previously had been in use at very nominal rate, but at present we have systematic market research technique and methodology for market positioning and for the formulation of suitable strategies for the farmers. One of the suitable and systematic marketing research techniques is perceptual mapping. Perceptual maps are often used in marketing to visually study relations between two or more attributes the process of making perceptual map is perceptual mapping. However, in many perceptual maps published in the recent literature it remains unclear what is being shown and how the relations between the points in the map can be interpreted or even what a point represents. The term perceptual map refers to plots obtained by a series of different techniques, such as principal component analysis, (multiple) correspondence analysis, and multidimensional scaling, each needing specific requirements for producing the map and interpreting it. Some of the major flaws of published perceptual maps are omission of reference to the techniques that produced the map, non-unit shape parameters for the map, and unclear labelling of the points. To facilitate this, a small set of simple icons that indicate the rules for correctly interpreting the map. We present several examples, point out flaws and show how to produce better maps.