• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
• /
• v.15
• /
• pp.253-265
• /
• 1990

This article was written with two purposes in mind. The first purpose was to introduce clothing and textile community who may not be familiar with Multidimensional Scaling(MDS) with usefulness of the new technique in the area of fashion merchandising. The second purpose was to present the results of an empirical study on brand image utilizing MDS and its related technique as the main analysis tools. The main objective of the empirical study was to gain a better understanding of consumer's brand image by relating differences in perception and attributes of clothing in women's ready-to wear market. For this empirical study, the ten brands and the fifteen attributes of clothing were chosen. The questionnaire consisting of questions asking about the similarity and attributes of clothing between selected brands was administrated to 185 career women during summer in 1989. Data were analyzed cluster analysis, and KYST and PROFIT in MDS program. The results were as follows: 1. The similarities data for the ten selected brand by using KYST program of MDS drawed the perceptual map. The results of this perceptual map showed that the selected brand were grouped into three clusters. 2. In order to get a somewhat objective view of which attributes consumers are attributing to each brand, PROFIT program was used. As a result, it was revealed that assortment depth / width, price, youth-oriented style, possibility of various social activity were significant attributes in consumer's brand choice rather than physical attributes of clothing such as quality or durability. This may imply that consumer orientation in rapidly changing environments of women's apparel market was its basic idea, and the focus of all fashion merchandising activities was put on need's and the response of consumer group who are the object of the target. Implicating for future research as well as for strategy of brand positioning were also suggested.