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Panasonic is in electronics manufacturing business. Panasonic's division than makes LCD TV ' s is under pressure from the CEO to increase sales. The Chief
Panasonic is in electronics manufacturing business. Panasonic's division than makes LCD TVs is under
pressure from the CEO to increase sales. The Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Operations Officer of
the company are strictly against changing the price of the TVs as they believe that on average Panasonic
sells its TVs cheaper than its competitors which include Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Vizio, LG and Philips.
After brain storming with his team, the TV division head Hiro Ito is determined that the only way
forward is to improve the product quality. However, given the economic downturn the funds available
for investing in R&D are quite limited And the cost of improvement of any feature is exponentially
increasing in the extent to which the feature is improved. Further, there are differences of opinion
among his team regarding which aspect of their product they should improve.
After intensive discussion amongst themselves, they feel that they should try to gauge how they
consumers thought of them in comparison to their competitors. They approached the new UGC sub
division within the marketing division. The UGC division was set up to capture what their customers
were saying about them on the web. While this division was collecting a lot of data generated regarding
Panasonic by its customers, UGC division head Yuji Hukiri was struggling with a way to show the
business value of his division. This opportunity arrived at the right time for him and he was quite happy
to help Hiro's team in the endeavor. They quickly decided that they would focus only on product reviews
and collect data not only themselves but also on their competitors.
Yujis team quickly created an exhaustive list of all websites which provided customer generated product
reviews including Amazon, Epinions, etc. They also decided to collect review information from experts
eg consumer report, etc. regarding their and competitor's products. Using text mining and sentiment
analysis tools they identified six features which the consumers talked the most about in their reviews:
Video quality, Sound quality, Appearance, Number of Features, Ease of set up and Life span. Yuji's team
converted the text data regarding features into a numeric data on a scale of where meant lowest
satisfaction and meant highest satisfaction for consumers. For example, if Panasonic got a rating of
and LG got a rating of on video quality it would mean that on average customers are more satisfied
regarding video quality of Panasonic than LG Hiro's team was excited at getting this data but now they
faced the issue of how to analyze this data. One of the team members suggests to focus on that feature
of the product where they lag their competitors according to their consumers. She argues that this is
how they have done in the past. However, Hiro is not fully convinced with this approach. He believes the
data the UGC division provided is much richer and he may be able to get information on not only how
they are rated in comparison to their competitors on various features but also on what features the
consumers value the most. Hiro's team has approached you to analyze the data collected by the UGC
division and help them in devising the appropriate strategy forward.
They want you to figure out where they stand in each feature each user rating category relative to
their competitors, and if investing in the feature where users rate them lower than their competitors is
the best strategy. If not, what would you recommend? They want to get a ranking for features in term of
where they should consider investing first. Assume that the cost of improving the feature is same across
all features. For example, the cost of improving the video quality so that the customer rating for video
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