IMAGEQ©:

An Individual-Weighted Brand Imagery Importance Approach to Consumer Segmentation ¹

By Dick McCullough

ImageQ© is a unique approach to consumer segmentation which offers several advantages over other methods:

• Consumers are grouped together based not on how each of them perceive various brands but rather on which brand imagery attributes are most important to their individual purchase decisions
• The most important brand perceptions (as well as the least important) are clearly identified for each consumer segment
• Brand imagery importance data does not need to be collected
• Virtually any existing brand imagery data can serve as the basis for this segmentation approach, making expensive data collection unnecessary

These technical advantages provide marketers, advertisers and anyone else needing to communicate to his/her customers several key benefits:

• A completely new insight into the target market's motivations
• A customer-focused foundation for developing communications strategies
• A fresh perspective on how to best define the primary and secondary market segments
• A new and deeper understanding of how brand imagery affects sales to specific market segments

The approach involves a unique and proprietary analytic protocol. It is an ideal tool for secondary analysis of existing data sets.

ImageQ© uses McCullough's Correlation Measures (MCM©), a family of non-parametric correlations which measure the relationships between a battery of brand imagery attributes and purchase interest at the individual respondent level. For virtually any data set that contains brand imagery data and some purchase interest or preference measure, one of these correlations can be calculated.

Analogous to the individual level utility weights from a conjoint analysis, MCM© correlations reflect the importance of each brand imagery attribute to the purchase interest of all brands tested for each respondent in the sample.

Cluster analysis is then conducted, using an MCM © correlation as its basis. Typically, several cluster solutions are examined and evaluated. The solution which offers the most interpretable and actionable results is selected for profiling and further analysis. The resulting segmentation provides a unique look at brand imagery-based market dynamics, on a segment-by-segment basis.

This is the only method that we are aware of to segment the market place based on the relevance of various brand imagery attributes to individual consumers. In a dynamic marketplace it is essential to gather information and make decisions as quickly as possible. Getting the right message to the right consumer quickly is critical to success.

This approach gleans additional and powerful information from existing data sets, saving time and money, while providing insights unattainable with other approaches.

If you would like more information, please telephone or email Dick McCullough, president, at (831) 454-8927 or richard@macroinc.com.

¹A version of this article has been published in Marketing Research (a textbook), by Hair, Bush and Ortinau, McGraw-Hill Companies, College Division, copyright 2000.

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