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Identifying consumer heterogeneity in unobserved categories

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Abstract

Categorization has been extensively studied in both the psychology and marketing literatures. However, very little methodological research has demonstrated the heterogeneity in consumers’ unobserved category structures and activations. We propose a new latent structure procedure that simultaneously identifies the unobserved categories that consumers use and represents consumer heterogeneity via different groups of consumers who have activated different unobserved latent categories. The results of an empirical study in Sports Marketing about sports fans’ perceptions of various sports illustrates how the proposed methodology can capture heterogeneity at the group level and account for a variety of different category structures.

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Notes

  1. There is also an indeterminacy between w gr , p jr , and p kr as all three terms are indexed by R. To resolve this issue, we normalize latent category memberships such that \( \max \left( {{p_{{jr}}}} \right) = 1,\forall r = 1...R \). This is equivalent to requiring that every latent category has at least one item that is most prototypical.

  2. See Dayton and Macready (1988) for the use of this reparameterization in constrained latent class models.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 20057, USA

    Simon J. Blanchard

  2. Marketing Department, Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University, 433 Business Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Wayne S. DeSarbo

  3. HEC Paris, Paris, France

    A. Selin Atalay

  4. Koc University, Koc, Turkey

    Nukhet Harmancioglu

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  1. Simon J. Blanchard
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  2. Wayne S. DeSarbo
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  3. A. Selin Atalay
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  4. Nukhet Harmancioglu
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Correspondence to Wayne S. DeSarbo.

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Blanchard, S.J., DeSarbo, W.S., Atalay, A.S. et al. Identifying consumer heterogeneity in unobserved categories. Mark Lett 23, 177–194 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-011-9145-2

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