Publications by Joel Cadwell
Continuous or Discrete Latent Structure? Correspondence Analysis vs. Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
A map gives us the big picture, which is why mapping has become so important in marketing research. What is the perceptual structure underlying the European automotive market? All we need is a contingency table with cars as the rows, attributes as the columns, and the cells as counts of the number of times each attribute is associated...
12456 sym R (279 sym/1 pcs) 6 img 1 tbl
Attention Is Preference: A Foundation Derived from Brand Involvement Segmentation
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”Herbert SimonWe categorize our world so that we can ignore most of it. In order to see figure, everything else must become ground. Once learned, the process seems automatic, and we forget how hard and long it took to achieve automaticity. It is not easy learning how to ride a bicycle, b...
14758 sym 10 img
The Ecology of Data Matrices: A Metaphor for Simultaneous Clustering
“…a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.” Nelson Goodman (1976)It is, as if, data matrices were alive. The rows are species, and the columns are habitats. At least that seems to be the case with recommender systems. Viewers seek out and watch only those movies that they expect to...
8317 sym 2 img
The New Consumer Requires an Updated Market Segmentation
The new consumer is the old consumer with more options and fewer prohibitions. Douglas Holt calls it the postmodern market defined by differentiation: “consumer identities are being fragmented, proliferated, recombined, and turned into salable goods.” It is not simply that more choices are available for learning about products, ...
10358 sym 6 img
What is Cluster Analysis? A Projective Test
Supposedly, projective tests (e.g., the inkblots of psychoanalysis) contain sufficient ambiguity that “what you see” reveals some aspect of your thinking that has escaped your awareness. Although the following will provide no insight into your neurotic thoughts or feelings, it might help separate two different way of performing an...
3152 sym 6 img
Recognizing Patterns in the Purchase Process by Following the Pathways Marked By Others
Herbert Simon’s “ant on the beach” does not search for food in a straight line because the environment is not uniform with pebbles, pools and rough terrain. At least the ant’s decision making is confined to the 3-dimensional space defining the beach. Consumers, on the other hand, roam around a much higher dimensional space in their search...
9147 sym R (221 sym/1 pcs) 2 img 2 tbl
TURF Analysis: A Bad Answer to the Wrong Question
Now that R has a package performing Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency (TURF) Analysis, it might be a good time to issue a warning to all R users. DON’T DO IT!The technique itself is straight out of media buying from the 1950s. Given some number of n alternative advertising options (e.g., magazines), which set of size k will rea...
6648 sym R (145 sym/2 pcs) 4 img 1 tbl
Consumer Preference Driven by Benefits and Affordances, Yet Management Sees Only Products and Features
Return on Investment (ROI) is management’s bottom line. Consequently, everything must be separated and assigned a row with associated costs and profits. Will we make more by adding another product to our line? Will we lose sales by limiting the features or services included with the product?The assumption is that consumers see and value the sam...
6347 sym 2 img
Beware Graphical Networks from Rating Scales without Concrete Referents
We think of latent variables as hidden causes for the correlations among observed measures and rely on factor analysis to reveal the underlying structure. In a previous post, I borrowed an alternative metaphor from the R package qgraph and produced the following correlation network. Instead of depression as a disease entity represented as a fact...
4549 sym 2 img
Modeling Plenitude and Speciation by Jointly Segmenting Consumers and their Preferences
In 1993, when music was sold in retail stores, it may have been informative to ask about preference across a handful of music genre. Today, now that the consumer has seized control and the music industry has responded, the market has exploded into more than a thousand different fragmented pairings of artists and their audiences. Grant McCracken...
11397 sym R (1238 sym/1 pcs) 10 img