My Consumers Claim Everything is Important… Now what?
By Susan Frede
March 18, 2024
Often when researchers ask consumers to rate the importance of specific product benefits, they will claim everything is important. How does a marketer decide what benefits to focus on?
The solution is forcing trade-offs using the Maximizing Differences (MaxDiff) technique. MaxDiff provides both a rank ordering of importance as well as the relative level of importance between items. Each respondent is shown several randomly generated sets of items and asked to identify their most and least important.
Below is an example of a MaxDiff question from our Self-Care study:
For each activity, a score is calculated based on the percentage of respondents selecting an activity as most important versus the percentage selecting an activity as least important. The higher the score, the more important the activity is. The lower the score is, the less important. In our Self-Care study, respondents chose “getting proper rest/sleep” as the most important, and “following a specific diet” as the least important. Beyond rank ordering the activities on importance, the scores also provide a relative comparison. In our Self-Care study, “getting proper rest/sleep” is nearly twice as important as ”eating healthy”.
The MaxDiff technique offers flexibility in how the questions are asked. Instead of asking about activities as in our Self-Care study, respondents can be asked about claims, attributes, product features/benefits, etc. It is also possible to customize the most important and least important wording based on the items being shown. For example, respondents can be asked to choose:
· Best and worst
· Most desirable and least desirable
· Prefer most and prefer least
· Most appealing and least appealing
When you need to determine what is most important, we can help you incorporate MaxDiff into your next research project.