Conjoint Analysis – A Real-World View of Trade-Offs

Buying decisions are never made in a vacuum. Shoppers juggle price, features, convenience, and dozens of small trade-offs in seconds. Conjoint Analysis captures that mental math so you can build products people actually pick.

Conjoint Analysis

When people buy something, they don’t evaluate each feature separately – they look at the whole product and make tradeoffs. While most traditional surveys ask about one feature at a time--which often leads to everything being marked as important—Conjoint Analysis offers a more effective and realistic way to figure out what drives purchasing decisions.

Conjoint, which derives from the words CONsider JOINTly, asks consumers to evaluate various product attributes or services at the same time. This method better reflects real life decision making vs. other approaches that ask consumers to evaluate attributes one at a time.

The key to Conjoint Analysis is tradeoffs. Consumers cannot get everything. They have to give up something in exchange for something else, and this is what makes Conjoint Analysis more realistic and more effective.

Importance Ratings vs. Conjoint Analysis
Many brands believe that relying on importance ratings, where consumers use a scale to rate how important different attributes are, can be a substitute for conjoint. While this is a straightforward approach and its less costly than conducting a conjoint, it has limitations. When consumers rate attributes in isolation, they often mark everything as important. Conjoint forces consumers to make tradeoffs, prioritizing the attributes, which is a more realistic simulation of how consumers make actual purchase decisions.

Choice Based Conjoint
This is one of the most popular forms of conjoint analysis. In this method, consumers are exposed to multiple full product or service profiles at the same time and are asked to select their preferred option. This reflects how we make decisions, by evaluating products as a whole vs. just individual product elements one at a time.

Conjoint analysis has many applications but its most commonly used for:
• Product design: to understand what features/services are the most motivating to consumers
• Pricing: to determine at what price and feature combination consumer preference is the highest
• Product repositioning: to understand ways of adjusting existing products to better align with consumer demands and preferences

When to use it:
Conjoint is most effective if it’s done earlier in the product design process, while still considering what features or benefits to include in the product and what prices are realistic and could appeal to consumers.

Ultimately, this research will help provide the clarity needed to make the right product design decisions that will result in the optimal consumer preference.