One step beyond the Conjoint: Menu Based Conjoint
One of the market research tools most commonly used to determine consumers’ purchasing preferences and attitudes is the “Conjoint Analysis”.
Since its first development, more than 40 years ago, Conjoint’s techniques have continuously evolved to better reflect consumer trade-offs in the face of a purchase decision.
With the appearance of the Choice Based Conjoint and the Adaptative Conjoint, the technique was “popularized” and improved the consumer purchasing decisions.
At present we present a new type of conjoint analysis: the Menu-Based Conjoint (MBC).
Tuesday, 10 in the morning and you still have not decided which mobile will be next. “Something simple maybe, not very expensive. Of course, in the current times “how can I not have a Smartphone? With or without data rate ?, it will be necessary to think it better “.
In the office you desperately search for information for a possible renewal of your PC: (RAM, hard drive, processor, motherboard …). “The best thing will be a laptop so I can take it to meetings. A laptop? No, the last time I had a lot of problems in the repairs and the prices lately do not go down ”
The lunch hour arrives and you go as usual to the bar closest to the office: 4 menus to choose from and two of them carry vegetables. “I hate the vegetable. Even if I had to pay twice as much I would never take any of these two menus. ” Finally you end up with a combined plate.
They are done at 7 o’clock in the afternoon and before arriving home you go through the dealership to ask for more information about the “Pole” that you have thought to give to your daughter. And .. what finish will be better? Advance, Sport, GTI, Blue Motion, Cross, 2 doors, 4 doors? … And this is not all, the dealer also gives you a discount if you secure your new acquisition with your company’s insurer. Which also offers you several possibilities. “Too much information for the time it is. Better I take all the paperwork, I look, review, compare, compare and compare.
I do not think we have been made so alien a “day” like the one we just read. Each time there are more options, combinations and personalized packs offered by the market.
Many times, in the day to day, the consumer is faced with situations like this. So it is really important to know our client and know how he decides and why he would be willing to pay more and why less.
Although the CBC is still the preferred method for modeling the consumer’s choice behavior, it is less appropriate to model the consumer’s willingness to pay for the extra characteristics of a product, that is, in those cases in which the customer has the possibility to customize the product according to your preferences.
In the market, there are more and more examples of customizable products according to consumer preferences: computers, cars, insurance policies, banking products, Internet and mobile rate offers and many more.
Given these scenarios, there is a need for an analysis model that describes the consumer’s behavior during the creation of a product and its possible characteristics within a menu of options.
The challenge is to model these options correctly and turn them into information that helps brand managers understand consumer compensation when new options (or “extras”) are introduced and when they cease to exist.
The “traditional” CBC is composed of several screens in which the participants must choose the preferred options between different alternatives of “closed” products. The focus is on designing a set of multiple products (created from the combination of factors and attributes) that respondents should rank or choose.
On the other hand, at the MBC, the interviewee can see the complete menu that is offered and what it entails: Price, possibility of adding or not adding another component, price variations, quantity, quality and aspect of the items …
The Menu Based Conjoint design is personalized and allows the interviewee the opportunity to choose several characteristics of a “menu” to build their own preferred product.
In addition, respondents can choose from “none” to multiple menu items.
Therefore, we can affirm that the Menu Based Conjoint can be more suitable for studies in which not only want to analyze and determine preferences of standardized products but also that it is possible to incorporate new products and / or additional or extra services. At the MBC, the interviewee takes a more proactive role in the design of the products (allows the ability to choose or eliminate features or extra services of the product).
