DEFINING THE BASIC PRODUCT ATTRIBUTES USING THE FACTOR ANALYSIS

The purpose of the research reported in this paper was reducing a large number of the product attributes into a smaller number of the basic attributes. Defining the basic product attributes could be useful for development of a new product or improvement of the existing
ones, for better understanding of buyers or for advertising. Each product consists of many attributes, but in this large number some attributes could overlap. The question is if this attributes are really different or can they be grouped into the factors. For this purpose the
empirical research has been conducted on a set of coffee attributes. The factor analysis was performed on the collected data in order to reduce the large number of the attributes into the basic attributes, or the large number of the observed variables into the smaller number of factors. Factor analysis based on the fifteen observed variables has extracted four relevant factors.