Perceptual Map

October 12, 2017

Perceptual Map

Created by a male doctor over 80 years ago, the tampon maintains significant shelf space in the feminine hygiene aisle at your local supermarket or retail chain. Although not often talked about, this product category has seen significant diversification in the past decade, leaving women with more choices than ever. With this variety comes increased competition for existing and new players in the field.

Market share data for the top-ranking tampon brands on the market was acquired from a site called Statista. Pricing data was pulled from a single retail site (Walmart.com) to prevent any variation in retail mark-up. Since Walmart is also the largest retail chain in the United States, I decided to pull customer rating data from their website. Please note that ‘private label’ ranked number two on the Statista list with 10.4% of market share. This category reflects the generic brand products that a retail stores offer. Even though I could not determine if a certain retail store dominated this category or if it was a blend of all retail stores, I decided to include it on the map with data from Walmart’s private label, equate.

Perceptual Map:

When looking at this map, there almost appears to be a cluster effect of brands by type of tampon. The older-style tampons are positioned at the bottom-left quadrant including Walmart’s equate and Tampax Original. This reflects the low-cost products that offer basic tampons with no new technology/features. Clustered on the right-hand side of the graph with the highest price and middle to upper ratings are the ‘newer’ style tampons that emerged on the market about 10-15 years ago. Tampax Pearl has the greatest share of the market while maintaining a higher price point. Tampax was the first to the market with their innovative new design. And even to this day, there are several brands with ‘me too’ products that do not present any further innovation beyond the Tampax Pearl. U by Kotex Click appears to be matching the Tampax Pearl in pricing and customers rate the products equally.

Playtex Gentle Glide is a bit of an outlier with very low pricing and high ratings. I checked other retail stores and found that this brand receives high ratings with very low pricing on their websites as well. Their market share is small compared to more expensive alternatives and perhaps the company does not put as much marketing effort into the lower priced option as they do with the Playtex Sport line, which is much higher in price with a lower customer rating. Kotex Natural Balance security is in the middle of the field with mid-range rating and lower pricing. The product is similar to the U by Kotex Click but it features natural cotton vs. the mystery contents of their other products. I would suggest that Kotex highlight this feature in their packaging and marketing since this is a current topic of conversation and concern among women on social media. It might enable them to increase their market share for this product.

All things considered, these products are just one sector of the feminine hygiene market. The market share for tampons in the feminine hygiene category is large but potentially threatened due to new and innovative options arriving on the market. Recent reports have revealed that millennials are moving away from tampons as they seek out alternative options that include some emerging players with ‘disruptive technology’. Any company or entrepreneur entering this market would need to do so carefully. I would recommend coming up with a competitively priced option that provides a similar offering to the Tampax Pearl and U by Kotex. A more daring option is to seek out a new offering that falls into the ‘disruptive technology’ category. However, this option is very risky and there are already a lot of ‘disruptive’ players coming onto the market.

Excel Data: