INTERACTIVE MEASUREMENT OF HIERARCHICALLY RELATED CONSUMERS' IMAGES

A new scaling technique was developed in the present work to investigate the image integration of consumers, taking advantage of the recent visual and object-oriented programming technology. Employed visual stimuli were the logos (and the accompanying symbolic marks, if any) of the four leading cosmetic makers, the logos of their brands and the photos of their product packages of skincare items targeted at young females. 19 females subjects evaluated the stimuli with respect to four, five and eight items for the corporate (Clmg), the brand (Blmg) and the package (Plmg) images. The image inheritance was analyzed on the internally anchored items. In addition, external anchores were employed to facilitate the Kansei processing in part of the Bimg evaluations. The major findings included the contrasting patterns exhibited by two makers both in the maker/brand discrepancies and in the image inheritances. Among the important issues to be considered in the future work are the mediation effect of the matching task and the class structure of evaluative items like those employed in AHP.