Product positioning using principles from the self-organizing map

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology that identifies the position of a new product in the attribute space. The methodology uses principles from Kohonen’s self-organizing feature map. The algorithm presented is robust and can be used for a number of objective functions commonly used in the product positioning problem. The method can also be used in competitive environments where other competing products are already present in the market. Furthermore, the algorithm can accommodate single-choice models (the consumer purchases the product “closest” to his/her preferences) and probabilistic-choice models (the consumer assigns to each product a probability for purchasing it).