Testing for Structural Change Over Time of Brand Attribute Perceptions in Market Segments Sara Dolnicˇar and Friedrich Leisch University of Wollongong, and Vienna University of Technology, Austria

CONTENTS 17.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 17.2 The Managerial Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 17.3 Results from Traditional Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 17.4 The PBMS and DynPBMS Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 17.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

17.1 Introduction Branding is a major strategic issue in times of increasing competition. Companies that market branded products routinely conduct market research studies investigating the image of their own brand as well as the image of the competitors. Despite acknowledgment of the importance of brand image as well as the routine in analyzing market data on a regular basis, the traditional approaches suffer from misconceptions that can be overcome by simultaneously analyzing three-way data with respect to segmentation, positioning and competition. Dynamic perceptions based market segmentation (dynPBMS), based on the PBMS approach [5, 1], is a tool that achieves this goal, offering a number of advantages:

• Generic product images are revealed in addition to brand-specific images. • Consumer heterogeneity is automatically accounted for in the process. • All strategic marketing issues (segmentation, positioning and competition) are

treated simultaneously thus avoiding the problems occurring when sequential analyses and managerial decisions have to be taken and consequently the entire strategy cannot be optimized.