About Surveys

Determining what customers want and determining the trade-offs they are willing to make can be very useful information for a company to have.   Conjoint Analysis is a statistical technique that allows you to quantitatively assess the relative importance of individual components of a product or a marketing strategy.  It magnifies the joint effects of mulitiple product characteristics.  It can predict the customer switch rate from one product to another.  It can predict the reaction to new strategies and products.  It can predict the customer response to alternative pricing strategies.  It is a great tool that aids in decision making. 

Conjoint analysis starts off with a survey of the customer base you are targeting.  Qualtrics.com has conjoint functionality with a template that really makes easy the process of putting a conjoint survey together.  It is under their "advanced elements" option.  An example of a basic scenario in which this technique would be helpful follows:

A marketing manager of a athletic shorts company wants to get a better understanding of the trade-offs their customers are willing to make and their happiness level associated with those trade-offs.

They determine four factors they feel are important with different attributes within each factor:

Short Color: Red, Blue, Black

Price: $15, $20, $25

Inseam Length: 14 inches, 18 inches, 20 inches 

Pockets: Pockets, No Pockets

The survey will ask questions about the importance of these different factors to the individual customers.  The questions will ask how much more important one factor is than another. 

The actual analysis of the a conjoint study is difficult, but valuable.  It provides beneficial intelligence about the best interactions of product factors and want customers want.   There are programs that can aid in the analysis (SPSS, SAS, Qualtrics, etc.) and this is probably the best route to take. 

This entry was posted by craigl on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Create Surveys, Concept Testing, Market Research, Customer Satisfaction, Miscellaneous.