Commercial Use of Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis (CA) as a method to investigate consumer preference structures is popular in operations management and marketing. This paper analyses commercial applications of CA. It reports the results of a survey of 304 CA studies conducted by marketing research institutes in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We show that the relevance of CA has grown immensely in the last decade and is expected to grow further. The main goals of CA studies are product development, pricing, customer segmentation, and brand evaluation. While ten years ago Adaptive Conjoint Analysis (ACA) used to be the type of CA most often applied (

Wittink et al., 1994

), today it is discrete choice CA followed by ACA and traditional CA. Two methodological problems with great practical relevance are investigated, i. e. the application of compensatory decision models and the use of a very large number of attributes. Furthermore, we analyze the practitioners’ satisfaction with the methods applied and suggest opportunities for future method development.