Before you start spending money on flyer printing, television commercials, custom poster printing and other types of marketing materials, you need to decide on a marketing image, or theme.

To decide on a theme, you should do some research first on your competitors' themes and your current theme (if you have one). One of the most effective methods for conducting this research is to do some perceptual mapping.

Perceptual mapping is a graphing technique used by marketers that attempts to visually display different characteristics - in the case of marketing, you'll look at image characteristics. Two dimensions are typically used in the map. To help you choose a marketing theme, the dimensions of importance and performance will probably be most helpful, but you can choose any characteristics that are important to your business. Importance means how important it is to your marketing strategy and performance means how well you already display or use this characteristic.

The process
First, you need to survey the market and measure your company and your competitors on characteristics that you find important. These characteristics should be things you can compare with your competitors, such as low prices, great customer service, speed, and accuracy. Check out your competitors' poster printing pieces, brochures, billboards - any marketing materials that give you a sense of their image.

Then you graph how well they do in the characteristics that you've chosen. See the illustration below. Your business is labeled "A."

High Importance
Low prices C D E A B
Great customer service
BEADC
Low performance High performance
Speed BACDE

Accuracy EA DC B
Low Importance

You can measure as many characteristics you like, but keep in mind that going over 10 will create a somewhat messy map that could be hard to read.

After you're done plotting, you can start to devise your marketing theme based on your map. While you're devising, consider the following points:
- Your position on each characteristic
- Whether the marketplace recognizes your strong characteristics
- Your business's mission
- If your desired position is unique

When you're evaluating your position on the map, you'll be able to see your strengths and what characteristics are worth pursuing. For instance, you are slightly stronger than company E on accuracy, but the importance is low to you, so you won't take the time to promote accuracy. All companies are closely rated on speed, and everyone does that pretty well, so there isn't much potential for standing out in that characteristic. What else can pull you ahead of the competition? It looks like everyone is on the low end of great customer service, and it's important to you, so that would be the characteristic to focus your marketing theme on.

Okay, so now you have a theme. And you know that you are moving ahead of your competitors by focusing on great customer service because no one else is focusing on that aspect.

So, when you start writing copy for your custom poster printing pieces, or you are taking photos for your flyer printing or poster printing items, you know to use words and images that focus on customer service. Your television or radio commercials should also emphasize how much you appreciate your customers and how your customers come first. This will help you gain customers over your competition because you know what they don't do well and your capitalizing on that knowledge.