A new product positioning approach based on fuzzy cognitive mapping

Abstract

To survive in today's highly competitive environment, it is critical for firms to offer a superior value or unique proposition to their customers. This requires detecting perceptual differences between the products offered in the market and the way they are linked to customer preferences, which provide the essential input for successful strategies. For this purpose, several quantitative approaches have been proposed in the literature. However, only a few of them have considered the change of customer perceptions over time, which is of critical importance for the development of medium and long-term positioning strategies. In addition, the lack of a normative approach, which provides the necessary conditions for achieving a desired position, is also noticeable. In order to address these issue, in this study, a new dynamic positioning method with less restrictive assumptions and no requirement for repeated measurements is proposed. The new method offers an improved fuzzy cognitive mapping approach that is able to model the change of customer perceptions over time and predict the initial conditions necessary to achieve a desired position. In order to examine the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method, an application to the game console market is presented.