Conjoin Analysis and Selection of CellPhones !

Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique used primarily by marketers to determine how people value different features that make up any particular product. The main aim of this analysis is to determine what combination of a limited number of attributes is most influential on respondent choice or decision making. The attributes are developed in such a way that it covers all the possibilities. It is widely used technique to test the customer acceptance of new product designs, assessing the appeal of advertisements and also in service design. The attributes form a wide

variety of choices to the customers from which they can choose their interests. This will help the company or the manufacturer to exactly know the preferences of the customers. This is also useful in finding the poor combination of attributes which will be a very beneficial for the company.

Conjoint analysis requires research participants to make a series of trade-offs. To make these revelations even better, the companies group the research participants into similar segments based on objectives, values and other factors.

For example, if we want to describe a mobile telephone in terms of attributes like weight, battery life and price, we give different choices to the participants in every attribute to know the preferences of the participants

.

For instance would you choose phone A or phone B?

attributes	Phone A	Phone B
Weight	200g	120g
Battery life	21 hours	10 hours
Price	7000	9000

The analysis from the above data can be as follows:

“Phone A is bulkier, but has the battery life and lower cost, but Phone B is smaller and neater yet more expensive and with lower battery life. Lighter weight is worth more than the loss of battery life, and it’s probably worth the extra 2000, so I’d choose B in this instance.”

By asking for enough choices (and with good design to minimise the number of choices you need to ask), the researcher can work out numerically how valuable each of the levels is relative to the others around it – this value is known as the utility of the level.

Posted by : Finance - 2

Author : Abhishek Reddy