Brand choice model selection based on consumers' multicriteria preferences and experts' knowledge

A primary goal in the marketing science is to describe, model, and finally predict the behavior of the consumers and their attitudes towards the products that form the market. Multicriteria analysis is a powerful tool in our effort to reveal the preferences of the consumers according to multiple points of view. The use of multiattribute utility theory along with models of consumer behavior permits the analyst to explore and describe different patterns in consumer's decision making by studying the distribution of assigned utilities. The results are converted into simple "if...then" rules and a knowledge base is constructed. Consequently, the decision maker obtains an additional tool in his/her effort to model in a most efficient manner the environment of the market. Scope and purpose The study of consumer behavior has gained an important fraction of attention and scientific research in marketing science. A broad variety of efforts and theories that attempt to describe the factors which influence the consumers in their purchasing decisions along with models which attempt to provide an estimate of the product's purchasing probabilities has been developed. Usually, in the application of these brand choice models, it is assumed that consumers share the same type of behavior and attitudes and in any case a single model can be used in order to derive the purchasing probabilities for the examined products. However, the study of the utility functions, estimated by the help of multicriteria analysis methods, reveals that this assumption may lead to an erroneous abstraction of the reality. The distribution of preferences, which differs from consumer to consumer, indicates that each individual shares different attitudes and types of behavior towards the examined products. Therefore, a more realistic approach would involve the selection of the most applicable model based on the type of consumer behavior and the inherent characteristics of the model itself. However. most decision makers do not possess the necessary knowledge to perform this type of analysis. An approach that can actually aid the analysis is to develop a convenient and comprehensive mechanism, which matches an appropriate brand choice model to each consumer, and provides the decision maker with the most applicable brand choice model, (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.