An Exploratory Factor Analysis of Market Survey Instruments for Automobile Industry: A study on Malaysian Motor Vehicle Industry

Abstract

Industrial and manufacturing sectors in Malaysia quite often perform market survey research to evaluate their customer’s behavior, trust, and loyalty through the marketing activities approach which henceforth boosts up their organizational profit. However, there is a lack of good and potential instruments that could effectively measure marketing activities for the motor vehicle industry in Malaysia. Thus, in this paper, a new instrument were designed based on literatures and opinion from experts for measuring the targeted constructs in this industry. As to accessing these validity indicators, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), reliability and correlation analysis were used. The results of the analysis based on 151 local made car owners indicated that all extracted factors as having good values of factor loadings and communalities (i.e. above 0.55) and acceptable level of reliability value (i.e. Cronbach’s alpha above 0.70). These extracted factors also have good discriminant and nomological validity, since the correlation analysis proof that, the directions of relationships among the extracted factors follow the expected theory (i.e. positive direction) and the strength of the correlation is moderately strength. Therefore, the designed instruments were valid and reliable for accessing the targeted variables in the context of motor vehicle industry in Malaysia.