Preference-rank translation is a mathematical technique used by

marketers Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to empha ...

to convert stated preferences into purchase probabilities, that is, into an estimate of actual buying behaviour. It takes

survey data Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey da ...

on consumers’ preferences and converts it into actual purchase probabilities. A survey might ask a

question A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogat ...

using a ranking

scale Scale or scales may refer to: Mathematics * Scale (descriptive set theory), an object defined on a set of points * Scale (ratio), the ratio of a linear dimension of a model to the corresponding dimension of the original * Scale factor, a number ...

such as : A marketing researcher will re-specify the numerical values during codification. 1 will become 5, 2 will become 4, 4 will become 2, 5 will become 1, and 3 will remain the same. In this way greater values will correspond with greater preference. Next, the researcher uses a data reduction technique like

factor analysis Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. For example, it is possible that variations in six observed ...

to obtain aggregate scores. To convert these aggregate rankings into purchase probabilities, each category (in this case, each product) will be weighted with a translation coefficient. These weights are predefined. A typical weighting scheme is: The weighting schemes vary depending on the variables being measured. The following chart illustrates the procedure: Other purchase intention/rating translations include logit analysis and the intent scale translation.

See also