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Identifying market structure to monitor product competition using a consumer-behavior-based intelligence model

Mingjun Zhan (School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
Hongming Gao (School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China) (Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, China)
Hongwei Liu (School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
Yidan Peng (School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
Dan Lu (School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
Hui Zhu (Department of Electronic Commerce, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China)

Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics

ISSN: 1355-5855

Article publication date: 28 February 2020

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Abstract

Purpose

The objective of this paper is to propose a consumer-behavior-based intelligence (CBBI) model to identify market structure so as to monitor product competition. Competitive intelligence extracted from Chinese e-business clickstream data is exploited to examine the relevance of consumers' heterogeneous behavioral feedback, namely, click, tag-into-favorite, time-of-browsing, add-into-cart, and remove-from-cart, to visualize the competitive product market structure and to predict product-level sales.

Design/methodology/approach

Our proposed CBBI model consists of visualization and prediction, which explore e-business clickstream data. We conduct the visualization and segmentation of market structure in the form of a perceptual map by employing K-means clustering algorithm and multidimensional scaling technique. Concurrently, we developed an updated Bayesian linear regression (BLR) to predict product-level sales by considering consumers' heterogeneous feedback. Our updated BLR specifically integrated the estimated knowledge of the previous periods to verify whether product sales are period-dependent due to the consumer memory effect in e-commerce, improving the conventional BLR of diffuse prior distribution setup in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE).

Findings

Considering the performance of consumers' heterogeneous actions, the present research visualized three different segments of the competitive market structure in a perceptual map, and its horizontal axis is shown as a signal of the ascending trend of product sales. The previous five-day period was ascertained to be the best size of a time window for the consumer memory effect on product sales prediction. This hypothesis is supported by the concept that product sales are period-dependent. The results of the proposed updated BLR indicate that consumer tag-into-favorite, add-into-cart, and remove-from-cart feedback have positive impacts on product-level sales while click and time-of-browsing have the opposite effect.

Originality/value

While the identified competitive product market structure elaborates consumer heterogeneous feedback toward alternative product choices, this paper contributes by extending those homogeneous consumer preferences-related marketing studies. The perceptual map's configuration in respect to period-dependent product sales facilitates the effective inclusion of consumer behavior application in product sales prediction research in e-commerce. This paper helps sellers and retailers better comprehend the impacts of heterogeneous feedback and the consumer memory effect on the degree of competition in the form of product sales. The research results also offer a managerial implication about shaping the competitive edge by conducting different product management strategies in e-commerce platforms.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71671048]; Guangdong Construction of High-Level Colleges for Postgraduate Study Abroad Project in Guangdong University of Technology 262515006 [grant number 262515006]; and Top Innovation Graduate Student Cultivation Project Fund.

Citation

Zhan, M., Gao, H., Liu, H., Peng, Y., Lu, D. and Zhu, H. (2020), "Identifying market structure to monitor product competition using a consumer-behavior-based intelligence model", Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 99-123. https://doi.org/10.1108/APJML-08-2019-0497

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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