Using Customer Feedback To Inform Product Design Decisions
So you’re planning to develop a new product, and want to know which features will be most important to potential buyers and which could be nice to have, but not critical. Maybe you want to estimate how adding a specific attribute could change potential market adoption.
These are obviously important questions. So, how to get the answers?
In many product categories, the best choice is to conduct primary market research to get direct feedback from your target market. In some cases, qualitative feedback is fine—depending on your budget and analysis needs. But more commonly, in order to make firm decisions about product design, quantitative market research is the best choice. If you want reliable conclusions about the priority ranking of 10 potential product features, you need hard market research data.
[Do exceptions exist? Yes. There are some product categories and contexts in which primary market research is unlikely to yield reliable results. If you are wondering if you might be in that kind of situation, contact me and I'll be happy to discuss it with you.]
If you are thinking about using market research to inform product design decisions, you may be sending out an RFP to some market research agencies. And when their proposals come back to you, you will likely start hearing about data analysis techniques such as conjoint analysis (or discrete choice, which is a type of conjoint) and MaxDiff. You may get different recommendations from different market research agencies about which will be best—and that can get confusing.
What is the difference between MaxDiff and Conjoint? One of my favorite experts on this topic is Brett Jarvis, from Sawtooth Technologies Consulting group, who wrote an article on this question for the Research Rockstar newsletter.
Here is an excerpt from Brett’s article:
“The reasons some people might get confused between conjoint and MaxDiff are two-fold. The first reason is that they both involve trade-offs to some extent. The respondent is effectively told that they can’t have everything and is forced to make choices. However, in a MaxDiff study the respondent evaluates a single list of items, whereas in conjoint the respondent evaluates complete products made up of various features. This brings us to the second reason. Both techniques can tell you how customers value different features. However, if you are focusing on a single list of items only, conjoint is likely more complex than is needed, whereas if you want to understand customer preferences across features, conjoint is essential.”
After you read this article, you will feel a lot more comfortable reading proposals from market research agencies that recommend these techniques.
No matter what techniques you are considering, always keep your research participants in mind. Some research designs can lead to longer, more cognitively challenging questionnaire designs. Will they be ok with a longer, more challenging questionnaire? Or will they balk at any surveys that take over 10 minutes? Sometimes a research design can be ideal from an analysis point of view, but if your survey takers won’t comply, a simpler approach will be a better choice.
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Have a market research question? Kathryn Korostoff is president of Research Rockstar, a company that delivers online and in-person training to busy professionals seeking market research excellence. Kathryn is a market research professional with a special interest in how organizations acquire, manage, and apply market research. Over the past 20 years, she has personally directed more than 600 primary market research projects and published over 100 bylined articles in trade magazines. http://Twitter.com/Researchrocks
About the Author
Kathryn Korostoff is a successful entrepreneur and market research professional with a special interest in how organizations acquire, manage, and apply market research. Over the past 20 years, she has personally directed more than 600 primary market research projects and published over 100 bylined articles in trade magazines. Currently, Kathryn spends her time assisting companies as they create market research departments, develop market research strategies, or otherwise optimize their use of market research. Prior to Research Rockstar, Kathryn completed the transition of Sage Research—an agency that she founded and led for 13 years— to its new parent company.
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