How to Do Conjoint Analysis with a Step-by-Step Guide |

So, you’ve just secured a coveted Super Bowl ad spot. The stakes are high, and this could make or break your campaign. How do you know what ad elements will truly resonate with your audience?

This is where conjoint analysis comes in. You can fine-tune your approach to maximize impact by revealing what your customers value most.

Conjoint analysis empowers marketers and product managers by testing variations to uncover which elements drive consumer preferences.

This powerful tool fits seamlessly into your marketing planning process, helping you predict consumer choices and optimize decisions to increase product appeal.

In this blog post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about conjoint analysis, how to do it, and its real-world applications.

What Is Conjoint Analysis?

Conjoint analysis is a market research technique used to understand customer preferences by presenting participants with different combinations of product features.

This method helps uncover what matters most to your audience, allowing businesses to prioritize features and pricing strategies effectively.

For example, a car manufacturer can use conjoint analysis to determine if customers value fuel efficiency more than luxury interiors when choosing a new model.

Key components of conjoint analysis

Conjoint analysis isn’t just a tool—it’s your roadmap to designing products people genuinely want. With actionable insights from survey data and market simulators, you can refine your strategies and gain valuable insights into your audience’s preferences.

Here are the key components:

• Attributes and attribute levels: Attributes are the building blocks of your product, like price or color. Levels are the specific options for each attribute (e.g., $10, $20; red, blue). Nailing these combinations helps set the stage for impactful insights
• Product profiles: These are combinations of attributes—essentially mock-ups of your product. They allow your audience to evaluate different versions and provide insights into what they would pick
• Choice tasks: Respondents choose between product profiles, simulating real-life trade-offs. For instance, would they prefer free shipping over a discount?
• Data collection: Using methods like choice-based conjoint analysis (CBC) or adaptive conjoint analysis (ACA), you collect honest feedback to build precise models of consumer preferences
• Statistical analysis: By using part-worth utilities and utility scores, you quantify how much value customers assign to each feature

Types of conjoint analysis

There are various types of conjoint analysis, each suited for different research needs:

• Choice-based conjoint (CBC): The most widely used type, CBC, asks respondents to choose between product profiles. It’s ideal for understanding consumer trade-offs and optimizing product features
• Adaptive choice-based conjoint (ACBC): This is a more advanced form of CBC that adapts questions based on previous answers, offering deeper insights into individual preferences​
• Adaptive conjoint analysis (ACA): This involves rating pairs of products on a scale. It’s effective for handling more attributes but less useful for studying price sensitivity
• Menu-based conjoint (MBC): This method allows respondents to select multiple items from a menu, ideal for bundled offers
• Full-profile conjoint analysis: Here, respondents rank or rate complete product profiles, which can become cumbersome if the analysis includes too many attributes​
• Self-explicated conjoint: This is a quicker, simplified method where respondents directly rate each attribute

When to Use Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis is useful when you want to make data-driven decisions around your offering. Here are the scenarios where it shines:

• Pricing research: Use conjoint analysis to find the sweet spot between competitive pricing and customer value
• Product development: Identify which features customers value most, like faster shipping or lower prices
• Market segmentation: Gain insights into what different customer groups care about, enabling more tailored products
• Competitive benchmarking: Simulate your market share against competitors and predict how product configurations impact standing through a competitive analysis of the landscape
• Product bundling: Use menu-based conjoint analysis (MBC) to determine the best subscription package or service combo
• Concept testing: Run your idea through a conjoint analysis survey to understand how attribute changes impact consumer choices

How to Conduct Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis requires careful planning and execution to yield actionable insights. is a powerful work management platform that brings your tasks, conversations, and context together to help you flawlessly plan, track, and execute complex projects. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to conducting conjoint analysis effectively:

Step 1: Define objectives

Before starting, outline what you want to achieve. Are you exploring preferences for new features, identifying optimal price points, or examining trade-offs?

Clearly defined objectives guide your study design and ensure you focus on the attributes and levels that matter most.

Follow a structured process to define an objective for conjoint analysis that is focused, actionable, and aligned with decision-making needs. Here’s how to nail it down:

• Pinpoint the business challenge: Start by identifying the problem you’re trying to solve—pricing, feature prioritization, or market positioning
• Clarify the purpose: Define what you want to achieve, like uncovering customer preferences, optimizing product features, or crafting better pricing strategies
• Know your audience: Specify the target market or customer segment. Are you analyzing tech-savvy millennials or value-conscious consumers?
• Highlight key product attributes: List the features you want to test (e.g., size, color, price) and their variations. This will shape the framework of your analysis
• Connect to business decisions: Ensure your objective ties directly to actionable outcomes, like launching a new product or refining your marketing approach
• Craft a focused research question: Create a question to steer your analysis, such as, “What combination of features drives the highest purchase intent?”
• Choose the right conjoint method: Decide on the type of conjoint analysis—Choice-Based, Adaptive, or another method—that aligns with your goals
• Involve key stakeholders: Collaborate with teams like product management or marketing to refine the objective and ensure the department’s alignment
• Run a pilot test: Conduct a small trial to confirm that your objectives and design elements resonate with your audience
• Refine and finalize: Use feedback from the pilot to sharpen your focus and lock in your final objective, ensuring it’s actionable and impactful

These steps will give you a solid foundation for conducting a practical conjoint analysis that delivers meaningful insights. Defining an objective is like running a mini conjoint analysis survey.

Use Docs as your team’s central hub to document objectives and create a blueprint for your conjoint analysis study. Docs’ structured sections and rich-text formatting enhance readability while collaborative editing and commenting and the ability to link your tasks and attachments to the doc keep everyone on the same page. 

Step 2: Identify attributes and levels

Break down your product into attributes (core components) and levels (specific options for each attribute). Aim for a balance between detail and simplicity to avoid overwhelming respondents. 

Mind Maps let you visually brainstorm these attributes and levels, helping you systematically organize ideas. By mapping relationships and dependencies, you can quickly identify which features to prioritize for maximum impact in your conjoint analysis.

This approach ensures a streamlined setup and enables a more focused evaluation of customer preferences.

Step 3: Create product profiles

Combine attributes and levels into hypothetical product concepts. These concepts—or profiles—appear in choice tasks, where respondents rank or choose their preferred option.

Creating product profiles requires you to keep some basic things in mind:

• Combine attributes and levels: Generate profiles by systematically pairing different attribute levels (e.g., 24-hour battery life with an OLED display and $300 price). Avoid unrealistic combinations that may skew results
• Include key details: Provide clear, concise information through each profile about all attributes to make it easier for respondents to evaluate and compare
• Ensure balance: Create enough profiles to cover the variability but keep the number manageable to prevent respondent fatigue

With the Table View, you can efficiently organize product profiles and attribute combinations. You can arrange attribute combinations in a spreadsheet-style layout, making it easier to track details.

Custom Fields in Table View can store preference scores, feedback, or other key data points, enabling you to visualize which profiles perform best.

It simplifies tracking trends and identifies the most appealing combinations for your target audience.

Step 4: Choose a conjoint analysis method

Selecting the right conjoint analysis method is pivotal to achieving your objectives. Each method has its strengths depending on your product and research goals. For example:

• Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) is ideal for simulating real-world purchasing scenarios. Respondents choose their preferred options, revealing trade-offs they’re willing to make
• Menu-Based Conjoint (MBC) is helpful for customizable products, where customers select individual components or features (e.g., building a subscription package)

Whiteboards are perfect for brainstorming and choosing the most suitable method. Visualize the pros and cons of each technique in a collaborative space to clarify how it fits your research objectives.

Teams can map out decision flows, annotate key insights, and finalize the chosen method with real-time input, ensuring everyone agrees on the final choice before moving forward.

Step 5: Collect data

Data collection typically involves a conjoint survey distributed to your target audience. This step ensures you capture preferences that drive decision-making.

Use the Form View to design clear and engaging surveys. It is a robust tool for creating and managing surveys directly within your workspace.

With the tool, you can:

• Use drag-and-drop features to design user-friendly surveys tailored to your product attributes and levels
• Capture responses in real time, allowing you to monitor progress and adjust strategies as needed
• Integrate all survey data automatically into , where you can organize responses using tags, filters, or Custom Fields
• Consolidate your responses within Dashboards for a centralized overview, helping you spot trends quickly
• Convert responses directly into actionable Tasks

This process enhances data accuracy and ensures your workspace remains the central hub for all project insights.

Step 6: Analyze the data

Now that you’ve gathered all your data, it’s time to break it down and understand what consumers want. Let’s continue with the smartwatch example we’ve been working through.

Utility scores

For each smartwatch feature (e.g., battery life, screen size, price, fitness tracking), you’ll calculate utility scores to understand which features are most important to your consumers.

Higher utility means higher preference.

Attribute importance

Next, you need to measure the importance of each attribute. 

The larger the score spread, the more significant that feature is to consumers. You can easily calculate this by comparing the range of scores for each attribute and determining their percentage share of the total range.

Statistical models for in-depth insights

Regression or Hierarchical Bayes (HB) methods help analyze the data more thoroughly. These models estimate how each feature influences consumers’ choices.

For instance, regression can help you understand how much consumers value fitness tracking relative to screen size or price.

Dashboards let you visualize trends, use custom cards to track metrics, and integrate insights directly into your workspace for action. If you want to compare the utility scores for screen size and battery life, you can create a bar graph that clearly shows what your customers care about the most.

Dashboards aid your decision-making process, and integrations like Excel or Tableau can help for deeper analysis through your favorite analysis tool. For example, you could cross-reference utility scores with demographic data or integrate historical data to forecast trends.

By analyzing utility scores and attribute importance, you’ll uncover actionable insights about your consumers’ preferences, helping you make data-driven decisions about the next iteration of your smartwatch.

Step 7: Interpret results and make informed decisions

Once your conjoint analysis is complete, it’s time to translate the findings into actionable steps. This might involve optimizing product features, adjusting pricing strategies, or refining your marketing messages to align with consumer preferences.

Market Research Template

The Market Research Template helps organize findings, set goals, and ensure that insights lead to action.

With pre-structured sections for survey respondents, insights, and next steps, the template ensures a swift and smooth transition from raw data to insights. 

Integrate this template with Dashboards and Tasks to track progress on development plans and fine-tune product concepts based on your findings. 

Here’s how the template’s features directly support the conjoint analysis process:

• Break down the process into stages like “Survey Design,” “Data Collection,” and “Analysis” with Custom Statuses to track progress
• Use Custom Fields such as “Attribute Levels,” “Survey Type,” or “Research Stage” to capture and categorize data
• Various Custom Views like “List View,” “Gantt View,” and “Calendar View” give you the flexibility to visualize the workflow of your conjoint study and ensure you’re on track

Examples of Conjoint Analysis

Now that you understand the steps to conduct conjoint analysis, let’s explore two real-world examples:

1. Designing a targeted legal service 

A legal services provider sought to introduce an information service tailored to attorneys. Their objectives were clear: determine optimal pricing for the core offering, identify valuable add-ons, and prioritize features for effective marketing.

To tackle these challenges, they employed conjoint analysis. Attorneys participated in a survey, building ideal feature combinations and identifying their willingness to pay for specific modules.

The approach provided actionable insights despite the inherent difficulty of engaging busy legal professionals.

The results allowed the provider to price the core service and its optional modules strategically. Additionally, the study revealed which features held the highest value, guiding the creation of compelling marketing messages.

This example underscores how conjoint analysis helps businesses refine product offerings, align with user expectations, optimize go-to-market strategies, and marketing resource management based on consumer insights.

2. Optimizing healthcare pricing

When you’re offering potentially life-saving care, you want to ensure you’ve conducted plenty of market research to understand whether patients will use your offering or be turned away by challenges like cost-prohibitiveness.

A healthcare provider faced the same challenge and wanted to assess price elasticity for over 200 medical procedures to disclose transparent pricing while reflecting brand equity.

With each procedure involving multiple pricing variables, conducting individualized research was infeasible due to time and cost constraints.

The solution utilized a two-step method to tackle this challenge efficiently.

First, Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) helped categorize 200+ procedures into 20 groups by analyzing responses from 10,000 consumers on the similarities and differences among procedure pairs.

These categorized groups were then evaluated through conjoint analysis to determine consumer preferences, pricing sensitivity, and willingness to pay for each category.

As a result, the healthcare provider could access a robust pricing simulator, enabling optimal pricing across all procedures while factoring in consumer perspectives.

This approach helped create a successful pricing strategy and re-emphasized the value of integrating consumer insights into healthcare decision-making.

Conjoint analysis can be compelling in uncovering consumer preferences and driving impactful decisions. Let’s explore the best conjoint analysis tools researchers and product managers can use:

is a dynamic project management tool that empowers market researchers and product managers to conduct and manage conjoint analysis efficiently. 

In fact, financial services company Atrato could reduce their product development time by 30% with ’s help! 

helps you turbo-charge your conjoint analysis through:

• Custom dashboards: Get a real-time detailed overview of your conjoint analysis project in one place using Dashboards. These dashboards are customizable with cards and charts to track critical metrics like attribute levels or preference scores
• Task management and timelines: Tasks enable you to manage and track multiple test variables efficiently. Create tasks for different scenarios or product attributes to organize features based on team feedback and customer preferences

Additionally, the ability to link tasks and apply Custom Fields makes evaluating trade-offs and outcomes from different scenarios​easier. Use ’s Gantt Chart View to visualize project timelines and dependencies, keeping everyone on track

• Custom Fields: Organize data by creating Custom Fields for key conjoint elements like attribute levels, utility scores, or part-worth utilities

• Automations: Streamline repetitive tasks with Automations, such as setting reminders for survey completion or updating statuses after you achieve each milestone

• Brain: Brain leverages AI and context awareness on your workspace data in to automate market research workflows, enhance collaboration, and provide actionable insights, making it ideal for conjoint analysis

The bottom line? helps you uncover valuable consumer insights and drive informed decision-making. The added advantage of using AI for market research makes it an all-in-one solution for conjoint analysis.

Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a powerful tool for running sophisticated conjoint analysis studies precisely. It simplifies determining customer behavior by providing a structured approach to evaluating various product attributes and pricing.

With its expert-built conjoint analysis templates, Qualtrics enables you to list product variables—like features, price points, or packages—and test their market impact effortlessly.

Here are some key benefits of having Qualtrics as your research tool:

• Pre-built templates and logic: Set up and ensure reliable results with market research templates that come with pre-configured survey logic 
• Advanced simulators: Evaluate how changes in attributes affect consumer choices and critical metrics like willingness-to-pay, providing actionable insights in real time
• Instant analysis: Generate detailed reports, including preference shares and attribute utility, to uncover market trends without extensive manual calculations
• Automated quality management: Ensure you get access to statistically significant data for informed decisions with Qualtrics’ integrated panel system
• Customizable variables: Tailor your conjoint studies to specific attributes, helping you predict how product modifications influence sales and user preferences​

Conjoint.ly

Conjoint.ly is a comprehensive platform designed to conduct conjoint analysis for product and pricing research. It lets you experiment using discrete choice modeling, MaxDiff analysis, and brand-price trade-offs.

This tool ensures you have accurate insights into consumer preferences and pricing strategies.

Certain features can help you make the most out of it for your research:

• Pre-designed survey tools: Create custom conjoint analysis surveys quickly with templates that simplify experiment design while maintaining precision
• Global sampling reach: Access over 100 million respondents across 150+ countries, allowing targeted data collection for diverse markets
• Automated data analysis: Display preference shares, revenue simulations, and actionable insights using real-time dashboards to reduce time to decision-making
• Customizable studies: Adjust survey variables and sampling criteria for tailored research, whether focusing on attribute trade-offs or price sensitivity
• Cost efficiency: Using automation and end-to-end tools, Conjoint.ly minimizes time and resource expenditure, making high-quality conjoint studies accessible​

1000minds

1000minds has a user-friendly interface and utilizes a unique PAPRIKA (Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives) methodology.

The PAPRIKA method simplifies decision-making by asking users to compare two options based on specific attributes simultaneously. This step-by-step approach mimics real-world trade-offs, ensuring accurate prioritization and meaningful customer insights without overwhelming users.

It’s designed to simplify complex choices while delivering reliable results. It allows businesses to gather customer insights and prioritize product attributes effectively.

Whether it’s product development or resource allocation, 1000minds helps uncover what truly matters to customers by simulating real-world trade-offs.

Some key features that make this platform useful are:

• Customizable surveys: Tailor surveys for conjoint analysis to reveal customer preferences on key attributes, helping design better products or services
• Flexible decision-making: Manage complex decisions with the PAPRIKA algorithm, minimizing biases and simplifying analysis
• Graphical & analytical tools: Visualize and interpret results with powerful graphs and charts, making it easy to communicate findings to stakeholders
• Scalability: Run conjoint analysis for individual decisions or large-scale surveys, providing insights for businesses of all sizes
• Collaboration-friendly: Involve teams in decision-making to ensure well-rounded, objective results

Q Research Software

Q Research Software is a robust tool designed specifically for market researchers. It allows users to automate critical tasks such as data cleaning, statistical testing, and generating summary tables, saving significant time and effort during conjoint analysis.

Key features of Q Research Software include:

• Automated data processing: Automatically handles data formatting, coding, statistical testing, and outlier detection, reducing manual labor
• Advanced statistical techniques: Supports a range of complex analyses, including MaxDiff, TURF, and conjoint analysis, enabling in-depth insights from the data​
• Interactive dashboards: Offers integration with Displayr for creating dynamic, easy-to-understand dashboards that help visualize patterns and trends in the data
• Customizable reporting: Easily generates customizable, editable reports that you can export to Microsoft PowerPoint for effective presentation of findings

Benefits of Using Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis is a powerful tool to help businesses understand consumer preferences and make data-driven decisions about product design, pricing, and market strategies. 

The key benefits of the conjoint analysis methodology include:

• Unveils consumer preferences: Identifies the attributes and trade-offs consumers value most in products or services
• Informs product development: Guides the creation of products by prioritizing features that matter most to the target audience
• Enhances pricing strategy: Determines price sensitivity and optimal price points to maximize profitability
• Improves competitive positioning: Helps assess how a product stacks up against competitors and uncovers opportunities to differentiate
• Supports market simulations: Predicts market share under different scenarios, aiding strategic decision-making
• Optimizes resource allocation: Focuses investment on features or attributes that deliver the highest ROI
• Offers customizable methodology: Adapts to various industries and research needs, from choice-based to adaptive conjoint analysis

Explore Consumer Insights with Conjoint Analysis

Understanding consumer preferences is key to developing successful products and marketing strategies in today’s competitive market.

Conjoint analysis offers a systematic approach to uncovering what drives customer decisions, allowing businesses to tailor their offerings effectively.

By implementing the steps outlined in this guide, marketers can optimize their ad campaigns and product features and ensure they resonate with their target audience.

With its powerful project management tools, will help simplify your analysis processes and organize your insights.

Ready to make conjoint surveys and market research work for you? Sign up for today!

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