Abstract:

This report is not a result of personal research. It attempts only to evoke a few techniques which, at least in our country, are insufficiently used by marketing practitioners. The bibliography on such techniques is so extensive that we could not cover it completely. So we have chosen, according to our fancy, some answers to the question: "How can mathematical techniques allow us to go further in attitudes quantification?" (especially pertaining to metric multi-dimensional scaling of non-metric data). The authors providing partial answers to this question are numerous: however some of them have achieved milestones, summing up in a creative way the state of knowledge at a given moment, as Torgerson in 58 and Coombs in 64. On the other hand, there have been some breakthroughs, such as Shepard's work in 1962. We are at the frontier of theory of measurement, theory of attitudes and, of course, marketing, which explains the slow transfer from mathematical psychology to commercial practice.