A Proposal for Comparison of Impression Evaluation Data Among Individuals by Using Clustering Method Based on Distributed Structure of Data

Abstract

In the field of marketing, companies often carry out a questionnaire to consumers for grasping their impressions of products. Analyzing the evaluation data obtained from consumers enables us to grasp the tendency of the market and to find problems and/or to make hypotheses that are useful for the development of products. Semantic Differential (SD) method is one of the most useful methods for quantifying human-impressions to the objects. The purpose of this study is to develop a method for visualization of individual features in data. This paper proposes the clustering method based on Orthogonal Procrustes Analysis (OPA). The proposed method can cluster subjects among whom the distributed structures of the SD evaluation data are similar. The analysis by this method leads to discovery of majority/minority groups and/or groups which have unique features. In addition, it enables us to analyze the similarity/difference of objects and impression words among clusters and/or subjects by comparing the cluster centers and/or transformation matrices. This paper applies the proposed method to an actual SD evaluation data. It shows that this method can investigate the similar relationships among the objects in each group and compare the similarity/difference of impression words used for the evaluation of objects among subjects in the same cluster.