Attraction models are very popular in marketing research for studying the effects of marketing instruments on market shares. However, so far the marketing literature only considers attraction models with certain functional forms that exclude threshold or saturation effects on attraction values.(...)

The marketing literature so far only considers attraction models with strict functional forms. Greater exibility can be achieved by the neural net based approach introduced which assesses brands' attraction values by means of a perceptron with one hidden layer.(...)

We compare the performance of a specifically designed feedforward artificial neural network with one layer ofhidden units to the K-means clustering technique in solving the problem of cluster-based market segmentation. Thedata set analyzed consists of usages of brands (product category:...