Getting Started with Conjoint Analysis: Strategies for Product Design and Pricing Research

Ask people what they want, and they say, "the best of everything."  Ask them what they would like to spend, and they say, "as little as possible."  Assessing consumer preferences and willingness to pay through direct rating scales, with separate questions about product features and prices, often fails to capture trade-offs that underlie consumer choice.

Conjoint analysis goes beyond simple surveys, providing a more realistic approach to understanding consumer attitudes, opinions, and behavior.  Introduced as a fundamental measurement method more than forty years ago, conjoint analysis presents combinations of features and attributes in product profiles and asks people to rank or rate those profiles or to make choices among product profiles.

Do you have questions about the design of a new product?  Want to assess the importance of product attributes?  Do you need to predict consumer choice acoss a range of existing or potential products?  Conjoint analysis may be the answer.  Include brand names and prices in the description of product profiles, and you can use conjoint analysis to assess brand equity.  Product naming and pricing studies are often conjoint studies.