Research Tips

Conjoint Analysis

What important things are really most important? … Have you ever been asked to rate the importance of a product or service’s attributes? Question like that are common in many types of market research. Unfortunately, the results are often misleading because respondents tend to rate many things as being very important. Nonetheless, tradeoffs often have to be made in producing products or delivering services. For example, adding features that consumers say are important may mean an increase in a product’s price or complexity despite the fact that consumers also say that low prices and ease of use are important.

Conjoint analysis offers a better approach for identifying the attributes that actually drive purchase decisions. This technique involves presenting people with entire products or services (the real thing or a description) and asking them to rate them in their entirety. This process is repeated for products or services representing a range of different attribute combinations. The relative importance of the different attributes can then be derived statistically for each individual based on the ratings given. That information can be aggregated to form segments of people with similar preferences or to determine the combination of attributes that is most highly favoured overall.