BuApplication of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) Structural Analysis: A Case Study on Dog Food Products

Abstract

Objectives: In the modern marketing strategy, MDS (Multidimentional Scaling) can be an important core technique carving a company’s product or brand in the differentiated position in comparison with competitors. In order to extract efficient information from the data and to summarize these relationships among objects from the dissimilarity or similarity data, MDS is the typical method. MDS is one of the multivariate analysis methods in terms of statistical analysis method. Methods/Statistical Analysis: On this study, seven functional properties of dog foods are selected to apply MDS. The dog foods highly ranked in sales in Korean domestic dog food market are classified into five classes such as organic, holistic, super-premium, premium, and grocery. Five products per each class except of the premium class (four products on the premium class) are extracted. In order to visualize a two-dimensional positioning map, the statistical software (SPSS 22+) and 24 products are used. By using the Euclidean distance matrix, the analysis of 24 products is mapped on the twodimensional positioning map. According to a similarity result, the similarity at low values less than 1.0 turned up on the rational distance matrix. The products of the high similarity were a group of the organic class and the holistic class. And the grocery class also showed that domestic products mostly consisted of its class. Findings: The outcome of this research can be that the Korean brands’ super premium class with slightly high main nutrients can be viewed as having the highest competitiveness from the efficient preemption of market gap. Improvements/Applications: The results are applied to build a competitive brand positioning strategy to cope with the market changes in the domestic dog food market.