MMR Leads Choice Analysis Seminar for UGA Students

April 20, 2015 - mmr

This spring, Walter Blotkamp, MMR VP – Client Relationships, led an interactive session with Dr. John Wurst’s Choice Analysis Master’s of Marketing Research class at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.  The session focused on practical applications for Maximum Differentiation (MaxDiff) and Discrete Choice Analysis and presented four case studies highlighting the decisions to be made in implementation and the impact the research had on business outcomes.  Walter emphasized that as powerful as these techniques are, they should never be used without fully understanding the business context – they are often but not always appropriate tools to use.

The case studies Walter highlighted reviewed the conditions when MaxDiff and Discrete Choice are particularly useful such as needs-gap analysis, revenue optimization, and feature/benefit inclusion.  Walter emphasized the importance of visually designing choice tasks to create the least possible respondent burden and that one way of knowing how well the task was designed is to see how many need to be thrown out for “model fit” reasons at the end.  He also noted that we should never lose sight of the construct we are testing – for instance, in MaxDiff it matters whether we are asking about appeal, value, the degree to which something is compelling, resonance, or some other measure.  Good and careful design begets confidence in results.

MMR Research Associates, Inc. is proud to be a corporate sponsor of the Master’s of Marketing Research program at the Terry College of Business and looks forward to ongoing involvement in the program’s mission and interacting with students at events such as this one.