Analytical CRM – Meaning and its Key Features
Analytical CRM supports organizational back-office operations and analysis. It deals with all the operations and processes that do not directly deal with customers. Hence, there is a key difference between operational CRM and Analytical CRM. Unlike from operational CRM, where automation of marketing, sales-force and services are done by direct interaction with customers and determining […]
Why Managers need to Wake up to the Century of Declines and Scarcity
From the Era of Abundance to the Era of Scarcity The era of abundance is over and we are entering an era of scarcity. Right from oil and minerals to water and food, every resource that we have used to power and drive our civilization to modernity and progress is in decline. This means that […]
The Business Need for Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR makes for eminent business sense as well when one considers the knock-on effect that social and environmental responsibility brings to the businesses. For instance, corporations exist in a symbiotic relationship with their environments (the term environment refers to all the components of the external environment and not to ecological environment […]
Relationship Marketing Sells
Marketing is a subject that draws a lot of students who find it most interesting and challenging. No doubt marketing is a challenge. Students who study Philip Kotler will definitely become proficient with the basic foundations of marketing and concepts. However to be able to take up a marketing responsibility in an Organisation or to […]
SWOT Analysis of Nike
Strengths The biggest strength of Nike is that it is an extremely competitive organization with its approach of “Just Do It” slogan for its brand epitomizing its attitude towards business. The company was founded on the principle that it would make shoes for anyone who could walk or run and this has been the guiding […]
Factor Analysis is a data reduction technique. Given a large number of attributes, factor analysis identifies a few underlying dimensions by grouping the attributes based on the correlation between the attributes. For example, price of a product, the cost after sales service, and maintenance expense can be identified as a part of single dimension: Total Cost
Attributes such as Insomnia, Nausea and Suicidal Tendency can be collectively described by a single term: Depression. Here three variables/attributes have been represented by a single factor.
Factor analysis is usually more meaningful when it is followed by subsequent procedures such as clustering. Following are some of the applications of this method:
While factor analysis is used in several fields such as psychometrics, psychology, physical sciences, etc, we will focus on the topic relevant in this module: marketing research. The procedure for utilizing factor analysis in a typical marketing research study is as follows:
Industry examples requiring usage of this tool
For this method to be valid, certain assumptions must hold true:
| Var1 | Var2 | Var3 |
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 2 | 4 | 6 |
| 3 | 6 | 9 |
| 4 | 8 | 12 |
Each variable must be unique. Var2 and Var3 can be reduced to Var1 by dividing them by numbers 2 and 3 respectively. Since they are basically the same data sets, they cannot be used for forming factors.
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