Capturing customer judgments of product category

Abstract

Typicality refers to the extent to which natural objects exhibit the essential qualities or features representative of a group or category. People perceive the members of a product category in terms of typicality. Products with higher typicality of product category are with stronger brand associations and are learned faster than less typical ones by consumers. Viswanathan and Childers [22] introduced the direct and indirect measures methods to evaluate the gradedness of category membership at the product attribute level based on consumer perception. However, these two measures weigh each product attribute equally and lack membership of product attributes and product categories for the evaluation of product typicality. We in the present study extend the two original measures via the incorporation of the weights and preference ratings of the product attributes perceived by consumers through fuzzy synthetic analysis and evaluations to precisely probe the membership of product and category. Furthermore, the weights and ratings of product attributes were compromised to reduce membership variations between product and product category. The relevance of our advanced measures of product typicality is then illustrated with a case study of Taiwan shoes market to theoretically and empirically demonstrate its plausibility.