The evaluation and description of products, services, suppliers or potential customers are central elements in marketing practice. Together they form the basis for all market research tasks and the marketing decisions derived from these.
To achieve maximum efficiency in a market study, the features used must be relevant, understandable, differentiated and unambiguous. The formulation of items on a theoretical basis is always the first stage of such a selection process. But the extent to which an item list defined in this way is “valid” can best be discovered with the aid of suitable multivariate procedures. Such procedures show which fundamental rating dimensions exist, and whether the constructed items satisfactorily cover these. In this way, weaknesses in the formulations can be corrected, gaps filled and redundancies eliminated.
Furthermore, the use of fundamental dimensions makes possible to present the results in a simplified and easy-to-understand way. Relevant procedures are …
