Have you ever been asked to measure respondents' preferences for things such as brands, product features, job-related benefits, or product packaging? Have you ever been asked to prioritize a list of performance attributes or gauge the potential impact of different advertising claims? If so, you should consider the class of trade-off related techniques available within MaxDiff, a component within the SSI Web system.
MaxDiff is an approach for obtaining preference/importance scores for multiple items (brand preferences, brand images, product features, advertising claims, etc.) using marketing or social survey research. MaxDiff is a component within Sawtooth Software's SSI Web platform for Web- and CAPI-based interviewing. It may be used for designing, fielding, and analyzing:
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MaxDiff (best-worst scaling) experiments
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Method of Paired Comparisons (MPC) experiments (choices from pairs)
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Choices from subsets of three items, four items, etc.
Projects may be conducted over the Internet, using computers not connected to the internet (CAPI interviewing), or via paper-and-pencil questionnaires (using the included MaxDiff paper-and-pencil utility and the separately purchased CBC/HB system).
MaxDiff makes it easy for researchers with only minimal exposure to statistics to conduct sophisticated research for the scaling of multiple items. The trade-off techniques used in MaxDiff are robust and easy to apply (for example, much easier than the related conjoint analysis). The resulting item scores are also easy to interpret, as they are placed on a 0 to 100 point scale.
