PICTORIAL STIMULI IN CONJOINT-ANALYSIS - TO SUPPORT PRODUCT STYLING DECISIONS

Commercial conjoint applications usually involve verbal descriptions of hypothetical products. The authors argue that pictorial stimuli should be used when consumers' market-place choices are strongly guided by the product's styling, such that the choices are heavily based on an inspection of actual products or pictures of products. Alternative methods for depicting product styling in a conjoint application are described. The authors propose computer-aided design and computer graphics as the most promising methods and discuss an application of conjoint analysis based on computer-generated pictorial representations of car stereos. The results showed that consumers had the least preference for the styling option which management would have chosen in the absence of the conjoint analysis application.