Thirty Years of Conjoint Analysis: Reflections and Prospects

TLDR

Conjoint analysis is a widely used marketing method that models consumer trade‑offs among product attributes, supported by user‑friendly software and applied in thousands of studies over the past 30 years. Analysts construct product profiles from fractional factorial designs, estimate part‑worths with statistical models, and use these estimates in choice simulators to predict consumer decisions.

Abstract

Conjoint analysis is marketers' favorite methodology for finding out how buyers make trade-offs among competing products and suppliers. Conjoint analysts develop and present descriptions of alternative products or services that are prepared from fractional factorial, experimental designs. They use various models to infer buyers' part-worths for attribute levels, and enter the part-worths into buyer-choice simulators to predict how buyers will choose among products and services. Easy-to-use software has been important for applying these models. Thousands of applications of conjoint analysis have been carried out over the past three decades.