Champions of choice-based research

There are so many ways of dividing up research, but we find it extremely helpful to bear in mind the relative merits of descriptive and choice-based methods.

[+] It's always been an interesting debate about whether to focus with a respondent on the detail of his / her reaction to the product or stimulus material in question and probe deeply to uncover as much information as possible, or, whether to have a shallower but wider perspective and include some competitive stimulus material. When asked which option we prefer, it depends (doesn't it always?), but it's certainly the case that we veer towards choice-based these days more than ever.

Read the article from Marketing Week

Why do we think it's so good?

• Virtually all products are fit-for-purpose and good [+] Markets are full of good products these days, so being sure that a new product has the power to displace something in the buyer's current repertoire is harder than ever before. Choice-based methods, by definition, put everything in context for the respondent and are, usually, a better predictor of actual behaviour.
• Descriptive research can be overly optimistic [+] Asking people to tell you what they think of a concept or product in isolation has the effect of "pedestalling" it, and is likely to result in a falsely optimistic conclusion. Choice-based questioning in a competitive context allows conclusions to be drawn by inference from a wider dataset, leading to more robust results.
• Online research works well with choice-based methods [+] Online research techniques are extremely well suited to choice-based environments. What might once have been a tedious and repetitive questionnaire can now be engaging and fun. Surveys can be adaptive too, so later questions can learn from earlier responses (for example, reducing a competitive product set to a subset of relevance for each respondent), ensuring the highest possible data quality. Online survey techniques and advanced Flash programming have made choice-based research the first choice for most of our research designs these days.
• Choice-based works well in most cases [+] Choice-based works equally well across all areas of research - whether with concepts in a screening process or with product testing using Best Worst Scaling techniques.

MMR's researchers are experts at advising on research design.