If your business is successful, there are bound to be plenty of things about your products and services that your customers like.

Yet there are times when it’s important to know what it is that those customers value above all else, or even love, that makes them loyal and repeat customers who readily sing the praises of your brand.

That’s where MaxDiff analysis can be your go-to tool for market research. The methodology provides useful data about your customer preferences so you can make sure you are meeting their needs and exceeding their expectations through ever-improving products and services.

MaxDiff analysis is an analytic methodology that is used to gauge survey respondents’ preferences for different items and rank those attributes in a best-to-worst ranking.

With MaxDiff analysis, you can identify customer preferences based on lists of attributes or features for just about any product, service or issue. So, if your company makes exercise equipment, you could conduct a MaxDiff survey asking respondents to choose what they like most about your treadmills, e.g. quietness, online coaching, health metric electronics or portability. The same type of approach could be used by a hotel chain seeking to learn what’s most important to customers during a stay or a clothing retailer wishing to identify what customers appreciate most during an in-store shopping experience.

Gaining this insight via a survey using MaxDiff design can be the key to making better, more informed decisions and investments that can help drive growth and prevent you from making costly missteps based on assumptions that aren’t backed by data.

MaxDiff analysis works by forcing people to choose the most and least important attributes from a list that they are provided with in a survey. Since respondents are forced to choose based on a MaxDiff survey question, they can do some of the heavy lifting for you by identifying what’s likely to be most important to most customers.

In this way, a MaxDiff design goes beyond standard rating questions that only ask people to provide feedback about the degree to which they like or dislike a product, service or specific feature or questions that simply ask respondents to identify what they like without forcing them to identify which they value the most.

A potential challenge with those types of surveys is that people typically like many features of a product or service. However, without any insight into what they like the most, it’s difficult to make decisions and trade-offs in terms of what to invest in or improve.

Let’s go back to the hotel example. It’s likely that there are a lot of amenities that your guests appreciate. They may like the convenient location, free breakfast, unlimited Wi-Fi, valet service, comfortable beds and the full-scale gym with an indoor pool.

As a hotel operator, the fact that there are many features that customers like is great. After all, it only helps to enhance your overall customer experience, which leads to great reviews, return guests and positive word-of-mouth buzz.

But let’s suppose that business is so brisk that you now want to open another similar hotel in another area of the same city. Your budget and resources aren’t unlimited and you need to make sure that you get the maximum value out of the new location by attracting the most traffic from your target audience. This is an instance where MaxDiff analysis can work its magic.

Once you’ve determined the group or groups that you plan to get feedback from, you can create a MaxDiff survey that will give you greater insight into the amenities and services that members of that group value most.

From this survey, you should gain some instructive insights that can help guide your decision-making about the new hotel. For instance, you may find that the location with easy access to the city centre is by far the most favoured feature among the group you are surveying. Based on that insight, it may make sense to pay more for a location on some prime real estate that will allow guests to readily access the city centre.

Yet, if “free” is what triggers the most positive response from your guests, then it’s worth considering investing less in location and other nice-to-have amenities so you can focus on offering free breakfast, Wi-Fi and parking.

By forcing your respondents to choose, their answers will make it easier for you to choose your own priorities.

You can also put a MaxDiff survey to work to help you decide which features to prioritise in a product or service.  

For instance, when it comes to product development, MaxDiff can be a great tool in the process of developing an entirely new product or creating an upgraded or ‘new and improved’ version of an existing product for which sales may have flatlined recently. For example, maybe you’re a bakery that offers sandwiches, pastries and other baked items, but owing to a recent trend for low-carb diets, you suspect that your customers are prioritising healthier choices.

That’s the logical conclusion, but is it the right one? MaxDiff analysis can help you find out. So you could ask customers to rank the features that they like most about your products, listing options such as:

If your initial hypothesis is correct, then it would make sense to explore how to expand your low-carb and healthy options to better satisfy existing customers and, hopefully, attract new ones.

But let’s suppose that your results come back and they end up in the following order, from most to least liked:

These results provide an entirely new and unexpected insight. Based on the responses, it appears likely that the majority of your customers aren’t overly focused on healthy choices when they shop with you. Instead, perhaps they see your products as their go-to choice when they are simply looking for some great tasting baked goods or even as a sweet reward for making healthy choices in other aspects of their lives.

In this example, if it weren’t for MaxDiff analysis, you may have thrown yourself into revamping your menu so it featured a broader range of healthy and low-carb products. That would have been a costly mistake if it ended up putting off your best customers, who may decide to give Greggs their custom instead.

Let’s assume you have a new product with a long list of great features.

That’s great, but it also raises the question: Which features should be emphasised in your product offering? 

In other words, you’re looking to showcase the most compelling aspects of your product in your advertising and marketing that will resonate most effectively with your target audience of prospects and customers.

Advertising demands focus; you only have an instant to catch interest and deliver your most compelling message. Consider an unscientific experiment by marketing expert Ron Marshall, who set out to see how many ads he was exposed to during a typical day. Marshall abandoned the experiment not long after he had started, having counted 487 advertising messages before he had even finished his breakfast.

So yes, knowing which advertising claims will resonate most effectively with your target audience is essential. And a great way to find that out is via a MaxDiff analysis. You can craft different messages highlighting various features of a certain product that you are advertising and then survey customers to see which ones resonate most with them. So if you aim to pitch a new cleaning product, some messaging choices might be:

Advertising budgets are typically tight. The feedback that you obtain from a survey question such as this can help you nail down the most effective message, plus the next-best supporting messages for longer ads or marketing content.

Segmentation is nothing new in marketing. It’s all about sorting through your customers and grouping them in logical ways in order to target them more effectively while meeting their product needs. Common ways to segment customers are according to their age group, gender or geographic location, or according to products that they tend to purchase.

This segmentation is useful, but it doesn’t typically get to the core of what motivates your customers' actions and decisions. Needs-based market segmentation fills that gap by segmenting your customers based on their underlying attitudes and behaviours. MaxDiff analysis can help you identify the traits and priority needs driven by these attitudes and behaviours so you can then tailor your efforts and messaging to meet those needs.

For instance, a needs-based MaxDiff survey for a new kitchen blender might ask which of the following is the survey taker’s main motivation:

In this instance, if the most important need expressed by the majority of respondents is maximum convenience, then it’s likely that your efforts will be best spent on emphasising the ease and speed of the product, and future product enhancements can be focused on amplifying that convenience.

MaxDiff analysis can clearly make a huge difference by getting to the heart of your customers' top preferences and then providing actionable data to help guide your focus and decisions. These key benefits include:

There are potentially also a few challenges associated with MaxDiff analysis, including the following:

MaxDiff is one of several market research methodologies aimed at identifying and ranking customer preferences to produce best-worst data. Here is a breakdown on how MaxDiff analysis differs from other common methods: 

Armed with greater awareness of what MaxDiff analysis is, how it can benefit your market research and its pros and cons, you can now busy yourself with getting a better data-driven read on your customers' preferences.

The more you know about what they like and value most, the better equipped you are to keep customers happy and attract new ones to grow your brand and your business. MaxDiff analysis can play a key role in strengthening your brand. Work with SurveyMonkey’s expert research team to use MaxDiff to prioritise features and optimise your product.