Fuzzy Measurement for Durable Goods Market Segmentation

The aim of the research is to apply the results of fuzzy measurement of consumer preferences on durable goods market for customer segmentation. New phenomena on durable goods market manifest itself in consumer behaviour. As a result, the brand acts as the most important feature while purchasing decisions is taken. Brand assessment by the consumer is associated with a complex evaluation process of a few to several criteria, such as the reliability, credibility, modernity and prestige. The burdensome problem here is that assessment criteria for features, which by their nature are immeasurable on metric scales, are perceived differently by each respondent. Typical quantitative tools used to measure attitudes partly ignore these problems. Alternative approach, which attempts to account for differences in individual assessments of the respondents is the measurement technique which rely on the use of fuzzy numbers. Conversion of linguistic expressions to form a triangular fuzzy numbers allows for the differences in the assessments of individual respondents, and thus allows better identification and representation of actual consumer preferences. Classical, multivariate statistical analysis methods modified for fuzzy measurement results may be used for customer segmentation, which takes into consideration the nature of market for high tech durables. Customer preferences towards the attributes associated with the brand of sleeted durable goods is used for this task. In the study market data set on smartphone devisees was used