A review of multidimensional scaling in marketing research

Abstract

The domain of this review includes the development and application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) in product planning; in decisions concerning pricing and branding; in the study of channels of distribution, personal selling, and the effects of advertising ; and in research related to the fact finding and analysis mission of marketing research. In research on product planning, specific attention is given to market structure analysis, to the development of a master configuration of product perceptions, to the role of individual differences, to representing consumer preferences, to issues in market segmentation, and to the use of asymmetric MDS to study market structure. Regarding fact finding and analysis, this review deals with issues in data collection such as the response rate, time, and accuracy of judgments; the validity, reliability, and stability of judgments; and the robustness of data collection techniques and MDS algorithms. A separate section on new-product models deals with the determination of relevant product markets, the identification of determinant attributes, the creation of product perceptual spaces, and the modeling of individual or market-segment decision making. Three trends are discussed briefly; (1) a trend toward finer grained inspection of individual and group perceptions, (2)a trend toward merging consumer level measurement and market level measurements, and (3) a trend toward the study of the creation of new markets, rather than new products in existing markets.