Breaking free from constant reinvention
What do you do when your research has to be completely rebuilt every time a product changes? A leading tech company at the forefront of innovation had a vast portfolio spanning consumer and business products. The products are continuously updated, but their traditional discrete choice modelling (DCM) studies couldn’t keep up with the pace of innovation, wasting both time and money.
The development of new product features kept making the current research redundant, meaning they were constantly building new models from scratch. They needed a method that could be revisited again and again without starting from zero, while also differentiating between major and minor features in their products.
Building flexibility into the foundation
Standard DCMs aren’t built to evolve alongside rapid innovation. We knew we needed something that could adapt to changing needs. Our tailored approach was an Integrated DCM. To build this, we established a comprehensive benchmark study, into which we could then integrate specialized microstudies.
These smaller, targeted studies let us add new features or benefits from the client or their competitors to see how the market would react to them. In the past, examining these new features would have required starting from scratch. But the flexibility of our approach allowed researchers to simply build upon an existing benchmark instead.
One benchmark, extended impact
Our Integrated DCM methodology is also able to differentiate between major features and minor features taking into account products with the most complex feature sets. This gave us a granular understanding of the real value of product features, across different audience segments from small businesses to major enterprises.
The research revealed the precise dollar value of individual features deep within their product structure. Most importantly, the model maintained better respondent engagement, which resulted in greater price sensitivity detection and more accurate results. These deep insights revolutionised how the company understood their portfolio.
Continuous insights, consistent framework
Our approach completely transformed the client’s approach to product innovation. Follow-up benchmarks on new products and features built upon themselves, harmonizing with the original framework to create a symphony of powerful insights. This approach removed the need to constantly re-educate stakeholders and extended the research’s shelf life, saving time and money.
Because we were able to build a more complicated research design, the teams were able to improve their thinking on product attributes and feature hierarchy. This positively impacted both research efficiency and product development. With more insights and less research costs, the client expanded their use of DCM across the company, leading to better, more profitable product innovation.
