New product development, product line extensions or rationalizations, all need you to identify which aspects of the offer appeal, where your competitive edge lies and who might be attracted to alternatives. This is usually the realm of choice techniques that fall under the name of MaxDiff and Conjoint.
MaxDiff measures appeal of items, when there are more than seven to rank, by using a series of shorter lists. Its main strength is better discrimination among items, when compared to rating scales.
TURF (total unduplicated reach and frequency) can be an output of MaxDiff but is also a standalone technique. It was developed to measure which product extensions would appeal to most new people (additional reach). It requires measures to be converted to ‘reached’ or not, appeal or not etc.. .
Conjoint measures the appeal of product features by presenting alternative choices and identifying the ‘best’. Once the ‘value’ of features is determined, the appeal of any combination of features can be modelled.
Example approaches typically include ‘standard’ MaxDiff (for less than 30 items), Sparse/ Bandit/ Anchored scaling MaxDiff, Choice Based Conjoint, Menu Based Conjoint, TURF, Genetic Algorithms
Outputs can include an experimental design in Excel (for coding by fieldwork company), utility analysis, normalised ‘utility’ data file, Excel or Sawtooth based simulator.