Product Category

A Product Category is a category (with a product category name) for a set of related consumer products.

• Context:
  • It can a superclass to a Product Sub-Category (within a business product taxonomy).
  • It can be a Regulated Product Category from a Regulatory Agreement (such as Nice Classification of Goods and Services).
• Example(s):
  • a Book Category.
  • an Automotive Category (with, for example, a motorcycle subcategory).
  • a Cosmetics Category.
  • a Mobile Phone Category (with, for example, a smartphone subcategory).
  • a Consumer Electronics Product Category.
  • a Fashion Product Category.
  • a Sporting Equipment Product Category.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Branded Product Category, such as Sony Television or Samsung Smartphone.
  • a Consumer Product Brand.
  • a Category Killer.
  • a Product Feature.
• See: Category, Business Product.

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References

• http://docs.nacsonline.com/research/nacscategorydefinitions.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_%28WIPO%29

2012

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_management
  • QUOTE: Category management is a retailing and supply management concept in which the range of products purchased by a business organization or sold by a retailer is broken down into discrete groups of similar or related products; these groups are known as product categories (examples of grocery categories might be: tinned fish, washing detergent, toothpastes). It is a systematic, disciplined approach to managing a product category as a strategic business unit.

2011

• http://www.nacsonline.com/NACS/Resources/Pages/Glossary.aspx/#P
  • QUOTE: Product Categories: A defined hierarchy to segment product sales. NACS publishes the Category & Numbering Guide annually. Suppliers also define product categories based on their product line.

2010

• http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Nielsen-Advertising-Fact-Sheet.pdf
  • QUOTE: The top spending product category for national TV was Automotive with $3.4B spent in 2009. The most significant growth by any one category among the top 20 was mobile phones, with national TV spend growing almost 200% to $587M in 2009. … AUTOMOTIVE; RESTAURANT - QUICK SERVICE; PHARMACEUTICAL; DEALERSHIPS; MOTION PICTURE; DEPARTMENT STORE; WIRELESS TELEPHONE SERVICES; DIRECT RESPONSE PRODUCTS; RESTAURANT; AUTO INSURANCE

2007

• http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/mkt/dictionary/ppp.html
  • product category: the specific generic to which a good or service belongs, for example, while Fanta is a brand name, the product category to which it belongs is soft drinks

2006

• (Ghani et al., 2006) ⇒ Rayid Ghani, Katharina Probst, Yan Liu, Marko Krema, and Andrew Fano. (2006). “Text Mining for Product Attribute Extraction.” In: ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter Journal, 8(1). doi:10.1145/1147234.1147241
  • QUOTE: we crawled the web site of a sporting goods retailer . We believe that sporting goods is an interesting and relatively challenging domain because unlike categories such as electronics, the attributes are not easy and straightforward to detect. For example, a camera has a relatively well-defined list of attributes (resolution, zoom, memory-type, etc.). In contrast, a baseball bat would have some typical attributes such as brand, length, material as well as others that might be harder to identify as attributes and values (aerodynamic construction, curved hitting surface, etc.).

1995

• Lassar, W. Mittal, B. Sharma, A. (1995). “Measuring customer-based brand equity.” In: JOURNAL OF CONSUMER MARKETING, 12(4).
  • … Social image contributes more to a brand′s equity in product categories such as designer clothing and perfumes. …

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