Accommodating the effects of brand unfamiliarity in the multidimensional scaling of preference data

This paper presents a multidimensional scaling (MDS) methodology (vector model) for the spatial analysis of preference data that explicitly models the effects of unfamiliarity on evoked preferences. Our objective is to derive a joint space map of brand locations and consumer preference vectors that is free from potential distortion resulting from the analysis of preference data confounded with the effects of consumer-specific brand unfamiliarity. An application based on preference and familiarity ratings for ten luxury car models collected from 240 consumers who intended to buy a luxury car within a designated time frame is presented. The results are compared with those obtained from MDPREF, a popular metric vector MDS model used for the scaling of preference data. In particular, we find that the consumer preference vectors obtained from the proposed methodology are substantially different in orientation from those estimated by the MDPREF model. The implications of the methodology are discussed.The authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from the editor and two anonymous reviewers, and also from Michael D. Johnson and Robert J. Meyer. They also thank Michael Kusnick and Robert Kleinbaum for their assistance in conducting the survey.