Capture Your Customers’ and Prospects’ Requirements

Qualitative research can provide valuable insight into customer requirements and preferences, especially product attributes and design. There are several qualitative research approaches that can be employed by your product marketing teams to tease out the most salient attributes. Two approaches we recommend are conjoint analysis and discrete choice modeling. Regardless of your methodology, you are going to need a way to analyze the data.  Once you have the data, the next step is analysis.

Identify Product Attribute Preferences

Let’s quickly review the aspects associated with conjoint analysis and choice modeling and why they are good approaches for determining customer preferences and identifying product attributes.

1. Conjoint analysis involves asking customers to rate the importance of each individual attribute of a product. In conjoint analysis, respondents evaluate the product configurations independently of each other.  With this approach, participants are provided a profile of products. They are then asked to rate their preference for each attribute. Because all attributes are assumed to be the same across the products, conjoint analysis enables you to evaluate the differences between or among attribute levels. This analysis yields two useful measures:  the relative importance of each attribute and the strength of influence of each level of each attribute. It ignores how changes in level impact preferences. The biggest issue associated with the conjoint approach is that there is a gap between respondents’ indication of preference and their actual behavior.
2. This is why many folks consider discrete choice modeling as an alternative. A discrete choice study asks respondents to choose among the alternatives presented to them. In discrete choice, respondents simultaneously consider multiple profiles. With this approach, respondents are exposed to a series of choices.  For each choice, they are asked which attribute, if any, they are most likely to purchase. Discrete choice allows for the interaction effects among the levels of attributes. Similar to conjoin analysis,  discrete choice analysis yields two measures:  the relative importance of each attribute and the strength of influence of each level of each attribute. 

If for some reason you are not incorporating a competitor into the analysis or the number of competitive options are too extensive, conjoint analysis may be the best option. Consider discrete when Discrete Choice is usually recommended over conjoint when brand is one of the attributes or you are trying to decide how to configure your portfolio of products.

Purchase Your Assessment

Conduct Usability Testing Post Analysis

Once you have the product designed, an important component is usability testing. People closely involved in developing the product often find themselves too close to the process to have the objective viewpoint necessary to improve the design. This is why we strongly advise engaging a third party in the usability testing stage.

Usability testing involves observing how nave users (generally 6-8 per target group) from the target demographics complete the common tasks associated with the product. By observing customer behavior and conducting research, potential usability issues such as ease of use, error or failure, comprehension of instructions, learnability, and satisfaction can be detected.

These approaches enable you to understand customer preferences and take a more customer-centric approach to product development.

FAQ:

Comments are closed.