How a Conjoint Could Solve Your Company’s Prom Dress Problem
In a few months, my sister, will dance the night away at senior prom. To prepare for the date of her dreams, she will spend countless hours searching for the perfect prom dress.
But as millions of teenage girls know, choosing a dress can be costly and even risky for their social standing. Accordingly, young women choose their dress with the utmost attention to detail.
Walkthrough my sister’s choices of different prom dress attributes with me:
Color
Length
Cut
Waistline
Neckline
Back style
Sleeves
Details
Fabric
If each of these nine separate attributes has five different options (levels), then my sister has 5x5x5x5x5x5x5x5x5 = 1,953,125 dress possibilities. She has literally millions of dresses to choose from.
Don’t forget that as soon as she has picked her dress, she will repeat the million-choice selection process as she picks out all of the related details and accessories, such as shoes, jewelry, purses, hairstyle, makeup, and of course, flowers. If she hasn’t done her homework on dress styles, her dream night could become a nightmare.
New product development: the “prom dress problem” of business
Product managers know that bringing a new product to market is both costly and risky. Just as with the perfect prom dress, trade-off decisions like, “Which features should we build into the product?” or “How should we price the product?” could make or break the product’s success.
Failing to listen to the consumer about which product attributes really matter can be devastating – just ask Dodge about why they discontinued the Dart.
A Conjoint can solve your “prom dress problem”
Your new product doesn’t need to be a Dodge Dart; it can be a Porsche Cayenne instead. Conjoint Analysis is a statistical tool that models thousands of product concepts and choice tasks for consumers. From just a dozen or so choice task scenarios, we can measure the appeal of product features and combinations and predict competitive market share.
But how does a Conjoint work through thousands of product concepts?
Attributes and levels are “considered jointly” and people tell us their likelihood to buy. By analyzing people’s ratings across different scenarios, we can determine how much consumers are driven to buy for a certain attribute.
“The beauty of the Conjoint is that realistic purchasing scenarios make choice tasks that imply causality and best validate real-world outcomes,” says Matt Madden, Director of the Marketing Lab.
Read more on how Porsche used Conjoint Analysis to launch the Cayenne, the most successful luxury SUV ever (courtesy of Qualtrics).
Growth happens with the BYU Marketing Lab
For companies that are seeking innovative marketing insights, we provide top-rate marketing solutions, such as Conjoint Analysis, at a fraction of the cost. Driven by a top business school’s best and brightest students, we believe that quality market research is the foundation of success in executing the best marketing strategy that will help your brand image and bottom line.
Product optimization doesn’t need to be as painful as picking out a prom dress. Let’s talk about how we can help your company develop and optimize new products.