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Overview of PositionSolveTM
Why Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA)?
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MDA can tell you which attributes are important in the underlying market space, and which you can ignore. Because
discriminant analysis is capable of proceeding stepwise, it automatically discards attributes that do not contribute
significantly to the solution.
Because of its decision rule, when MDA-based perceptual mapping is combined with importance data, the resulting maps
represent both differentiation and importance parsimoniously. Every brand manager recognizes that good strategies are
produced only when you are making changes to a product attribute that is both important and in which there is competitive
differentiation. As mentioned above, MDA-based perceptual maps, especially stepwise ones, include only those attributes
that have strong interproduct differentiation. Thus, if the underlying data are importance-based (such as preference data from
conjoint analysis), the derived perceptual map maximally separates products based on importance data. The strategic power
of this approach is that it combines both importance (via the data source) and difference (via the MDA decision rule) on the
same map. This use of perceptual mapping is also called preference mapping.
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