A market-oriented approach to accomplish product positioning and product recommendation for smart phones and wearable devices

Recently, several global companies start to develop wearable devices like smart watches or smart glasses to avoid market saturation in smart phones, especially when wireless technology was rapidly shifting from the third to the fourth generation. In order to better understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of smart alternatives, this paper presents a market-oriented framework to accomplish product positioning and product recommendation. Initially, correspondence analysis is applied to elicit expert perceptions for conducting product positioning. Then, based on customer preferences, product recommendation can be accomplished in either an unsupervised way (purchase profiles for new products are unavailable) or a supervised manner (for justifying the validity of the proposed recommender system). In particular, analytical hierarchy process is employed to elicit customers’ choices among smart alternatives (treated as prior information or decision labels). In summary, managerial insights are provided as follows: (1) smart phones are good at providing a platform for satisfying home entertainment, (2) smart watches are perceived as auxiliary carriers to accomplish health care and safety monitoring and (3) smart glasses are promising to fulfill industrial operation, logistics service and homeland security.

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