Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis is an advanced market research technique that gets under the skin of how people make decisions and what they really value in products and services (it also known as Discrete Choice Estimation, or stated preference research). Conjoint analysis involves presenting people with choices and then analysing what were the drivers for those choices. It allows businesses to work out and quantify the hidden rules people use to make trade-offs between different products and services and to quantify the values they place on different features or component parts of the offer. You can work out the sweetspot or optimum level of features and services that balance value to the customer against cost to the company and forecast potential demand or market share in a competitive market situation.

Our interactive conjoint analysis demonstration shows a simplified example of this process at work or our simple conjoint in Excel example.

The principles behind conjoint analysis start with breaking a product or service down into it's constituent parts (called attributes and levels - see the section on how to design a conjoint analysis study) then to test combinations of these parts in order to find out what customers prefer. By designing the study appropriately using carefully chosen statistical designs (also known as experimental designs) it is then possible to use statistical analysis to work out the value, or utility score, of each part of the product or service in terms of its contribution to the customer's decision.