Title: Evaluating category performances in category management: an empirical regional study

Authors: Ozgur Erdiller; Georgios Papamanousakis; George Baourakis; Gert Van Dijk; Constantin Zopounidis; Dimitrios Alexakis

Addresses: Department of Business Economics and Management, Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, 73100, Greece. ' Department of Business Economics and Management, Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, 73100, Greece. ' Department of Business Economics and Management, Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, 73100, Greece. ' Marketing and Consumer Behaviour Group (Bode 87), Wageningen University, P.O. Box 8130, 6700 EW, Wageningen, The Netherlands. ' Department of Production Engineering and Management, Financial Engineering Laboratory, Technical University of Crete, University Campus, Chania, 73100, Greece. ' Department of Production Engineering and Management, Financial Engineering Laboratory, Technical University of Crete, University Campus, Chania, 73100, Greece

Abstract: This paper aims to identify regional properties of product categories and consumer perception and preferences of relevant grocery retailing product categories, in the Greek Island of Crete and the three cities. The dataset for this research consists of a sample of 2,000 consumers, distributed in three major cities in Crete. Ten product hyper-categories consisting of 102 product categories were identified through the regional grocery retailers. The collected data is analysed initially by rank-order and product-moment correlation. Afterwards, categorical principal component analysis was applied for clustering customer segments with similar demographic and consumption patterns. The study introduces a regional overview of category management practices and provides a detailed identification of the grocery retail market. This study also shows the mainstream profile in a relatively small regional retail market.

Keywords: category management; consumer choice; market research; market segmentation; market basket analysis; principal component analysis; PCA; Greece; Crete; product categories; consumer perception; consumer preferences; grocery retailing; grocery products; regional markets; demographics; consumption patterns.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDATS.2012.047821

International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies, 2012 Vol.4 No.3, pp.292 - 313

Published online: 06 Sep 2014 *

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