Finding out what your customers really want is one of the key objectives of market research.

There are a lot of things in the market researchers tool box which help a researcher find the answer to this dynamic question. One of the question types most used by researchers are preference scales. Although they differ in name and length the basic structure of preference scales is universal.

When using preference scales respondents are asked to express their level of preference along a incremental scale. i.e. 1 = very unimportant – 10 = Very important. The issue with this type of scale is that respondents are often likely to express that most things have some degree of importance. This issue often translates itself into products that have a wide range of features as it is difficult to establish which features should be left out.  What then emerges is a over complicated product which often confuses customers. Enter stage left -  ‘Maximum Difference Scaling’.

Maximum difference scaling (or MaxDiff to those in the know) is a statistical method (an example of the science in market research) which forces respondents to make trade-offs between multiple options. By forcing the respondents to make these trade-offs it is possible to find out what is ‘really’ important to your customers and therefore what they really want.

The results of MaxDiff make it quite clear which features are the preferred features and they can then be incorporated into the final product offering.