Customer Profiling
For a developing business it is very important to understand who are the best customers, how to find more customers like these and where to find. Customer profiling is the best strategy to accomplish this. It helps to find valuable new customers, enhance the profitability by retaining existing customers and also identify low valued customers […]
Strategic Management Process – Meaning, its Steps and Components
The strategic management process means defining the organization’s strategy. It is also defined as the process by which managers make a choice of a set of strategies for the organization that will enable it to achieve better performance. Strategic management is a continuous process that appraises the business and industries in which the organization is […]
Role of the Media in Championing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
The articles till now have focused on how corporations need to embrace CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) as a business imperative. The emphasis mostly was on how there are business needs to adopt CSR and it is high time the corporations became socially conscious. In this article, we look at the role of the Media in […]
Strategies for Longer Term Transformation of Print Media and Short Term Viability
Why the Future of Print Media is good There are many experts who have been claiming that the age of newspapers is over and hence, the future of media is digital. However, if statistics are anything to go by, print media are still relevant and their bottom lines are healthy in Asian countries. However, the […]
Organizational Learning – Maintaining the Competetive Advantage
Introduction Organizational learning is the means by which organizations develop, enhance, and manage knowledge and standards within their functions and in their cultures and adjust and improve their efficiency by making better use of the wide range of skills of their employees. It is critical for modern day business organization. In the present dynamic condition […]
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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