We have long used measurement scales to gain insight into what customers consider important. So we decided to look at the different scales, and found that MaxDiff is the most important for data analysis .
It is also important to engage respondents with interesting measurement tasks and for customers to see findings that prompt them to take action.
Measuring scales such as MaxDiff or Maximum Difference Scaling is a way of assessing the importance (or preference) of a set of alternatives. It is a technique where respondents are asked to make the best or worst choices. It has the advantage of being very simple for the respondent but providing extremely rich information to the researcher.
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I invite you to learn about some types of measurement scales that every researcher should have.
Why is the Max-Diff measurement scale important?
MaxDiff helps alleviate many of the concerns with rating scales, especially when respondents always select everything as “important.”
Common measurement scales often suffer from comparative flaws, i.e. users find morocco phone number difficult to describe which attribute is more important than another; this can be seen in the use of the linear system where users simply give the same score to all attributes.
MaxDiff, also known as the Best-Worst scale, avoids this by presenting users with a series of attributes where they need to select the most important and least important from a list of 3 to 5 features. In this type of measurement scale, all attributes are presented to the user the same number of times.
The theory assumes that consumers compare each item in the set against one another to arrive at a natural hierarchy from best to worst. If there are, for example, three brands of soda to consider, consumers can tell which is best and which is worst based on their experience and opinions; of course, that means that the consumer is not just comparing the best to the worst, but each item against itself. If brand A is best and brand C is worst, the consumer must also have decided that brand A was better than brand B, but brand C was worse than brand B.
You may be interested in reading: Market research and consumer behavior .
Advantages of the MaxDiff measurement scale
MaxDiff is a type of analysis that can be used for personality testing. A MaxDiff series of questions is set up to present a set of options to a respondent for them to select the option they agree with most and least; when asked in personality testing, it is typically presented as “This sounds most like me,” versus, “This sounds least like me.”
For marketing research purposes , MaxDiff measurement scales can be used to narrow down the traits that a customer finds most important in a product.
For example, a respondent may be presented with a list of five features about a product, and then they have to select which element is most important to them and which is least important to them.
This can be done with a brand assessment to determine which aspects of your brand the customer finds most or least important. Additionally, you can use the same set of max diff questions, for example, to see which aspects of your brand they are most satisfied with, versus which they are least satisfied with.
MaxDiff measurement scales can be used in market segmentation research to obtain accurate estimates of the most important product features.
The analysis generates utilities for each of the most important product features that can be used to generate optimal products, using market segmentation to place respondents into groups with similar preference structures or to prioritize strategic product objectives. You can have your respondents make a natural choice and illuminate some important features where the Relative importance of the feature in cases where the average Likert scale ratings might have very similar ratings .