Understand the competitive landscape and uncover what is most and least important to your customers.
Preferences aren’t always tangible, especially when they are asked directly. Not only can preferences be elusive, but they can be difficult to interpret without a standard method of comparison.
A MaxDiff experiment solves many of the problems inherent to traditional methods of asking consumer preferences by forcing a series of real-life tradeoffs. At Gradient, we harness the combined power of MaxDiffs and Bayesian statistics to produce not only a rank order of consumer preferences, but also the magnitude of preferences
A Max(imum) Diff(erences) analysis assesses a survey respondent’s preferences without directly asking them. Instead of ranking a long list of items which can be cumbersome and cognitively taxing, a MaxDiff has respondents choose the “best” and “worst” options out of a given set. Respondents are typically asked to designate the “best” and “worst” options across 10 choice tasks. For each choice task, a random subset of the total items are presented to reduce the cognitive burden on respondents.
Using Bayesian statistical analysis, we are able to calculate the probability of each item in a given set being chosen as the “best” in the list. Our output also allows us to pinpoint exactly how much one item is likely to be preferred over another.
The best part about a MaxDiff is its flexibility. Preferences can be rated in a number of ways, and are not limited to choosing the “best” and “worst” option. For example, if we wanted to know which qualities of a politician are most important when casting a vote, respondents would choose the “most important” and “least important” qualities in each choice task.
See how we’ve identified consumer preferences in the past.
Trendlines Public Opinion Survey
During the height of public discourse over who should be in control of public schools’ curriculum, Gradient utilized a MaxDiff to reveal the most pressing issues facing the K-12 public education system.
Not only did the MaxDiff experiment uncover and rank order the most critical issues, but it was clear that the American public believed 3 issues with the public education system were more important than the rest.
Read the full story →Trendlines Public Opinion Survey
If you asked a person to choose their most preferred car, it may be difficult given the number of options and suitable choices. Ranking more than 20 cars would be close to impossible to do accurately, especially for cars that respondents do not have strong preferences, good or bad, towards. To avoid these issues, Gradient used a MaxDiff to reveal America’s most and least preferred new cars.
Read the full story →Client Case Study
Our client needed to know which attributes are most (and least) important when deciding on which running shoe to purchase.
Gradient designed and executed a MaxDiff experiment to reveal not only which attributes are most important to current and prospective customers, but also how much more important one attribute is compared to another. These insights helped our client decide which product lines to prioritize.
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