A Review of Multidimensional Scaling in Marketing Research

Abstract

The domain of this review includes the develop ment and application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) in product planning; in decisions concerning pricing and branding; in the study of channels of dis tribution, personal selling, and the effects of advertis ing ; 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 con figuration of product perceptions, to the role of indi vidual differences, to representing consumer prefer ences, 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, re liability, 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 identifi cation of determinant attributes, the creation of prod uct perceptual spaces, and the modeling of individual or market-segment decision making. Three trends are discussed briefly; (1) a trend toward finer grained in spection of individual and group perceptions, (2) a trend toward merging consumer level measurement and market level measurements, and (3) a trend to ward the study of the creation of new markets, rather than new products in existing markets.