Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Blog for lectures 11 & 12 of Business Analytics: Team C



We started off the class in a pretty nervous fashion as the presentations were being taken. Four groups presented in random order each presenting their understanding of the K – means and Hierarchical clustering techniques.

Perceptual Mapping

Perceptual mapping offers a unique ability to communicate the complex relationships between marketplace competitors and the criteria used by buyers in making purchase decisions and recommendations. Perceptual maps may be used for market segmentation, concept development and evaluation, and tracking changes in marketplace perceptions among other uses. Perceptual mapping involves two steps:  (1) data collection and (2) data analysis and presentation.

The method of data collection can be executed in two ways:
 Similarity Based method
Attribute Based method

Similarity based method

An example for perceptual map using similarity based method was done with the file “Inter”. Here what we did was we grouped the services together based on the similarities exhibited by them to the customers. This gives us an analytical approach and devises the formulation of further strategies as well.
An advantage of this type can be that the individual is required to give their overall perception without defining the attribute used by them for evaluation.
On the other hand a limitation of this can be that we face difficulty in deciphering as to what attributes are being used by the respondent and we can only make use of general guidelines.

Attribute based method

As it is mentioned in the name itself, this method works on the perception of consumers regarding various attributes of a particular product. Thus it is a more clear way of going about data collection. The example considered in class had stores as products and various satisfaction levels as attributes which were grade on a scale of 1 to 5. These when mapped on the permap we get:





How to interpret the above map:

·         The arrow indicates the direction in which that attribute is increasing.

·         Length of the line from the origin to the arrow is an indicator of the variance of that attribute explained by the 2D map.  The longer this line, the greater is the importance of that attribute in explaining variance.

·         Attribute that are both relatively important (i.e., long vector) and close to the horizontal (vertical) axis help interpret the meaning of axis.
      
      The advantage of this type of perceptual mapping is mainly that explicit description of the dimensions can be mapped as the attributes given are very specific. A more important benefit is that it enables representation of more than one brand and attributes on a single map which is very useful in competitive analysis.

      
      
      Trilochan Pariyar
      Team C

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