Case Study
Context Research for Innovation: Consumer Value Preferences
“You name it, its in that car; its got every feature known to man!”
Goals
Understand the factors that influence consumer choices, particularly with regard to “high-value” purchases.
What product characteristics, lifestyle factors, and psycho-social values drive people to spend more money on specific products?
Approach / Methods
Interpretive lens.
Recognizing the subjectivity of “high-value,” we designed qualitative and quantitative methods that enabled standardizing data despite varying individual interpretations.
Word association.
Used to validate the terminology (e.g., “high-value”) we planned to use in subsequent research methods.
"Extreme User” interviews.
We asked financially independent consumers to describe any high-value purchase that they were very happy with. By letting people talk freely about a product that made them happy, we compiled a list of keywords and phrases used to describe high-value purchases.
Card sorting.
We generalized the phrases from the interviews to be applicable to one of three product categories:
Clothes and Accessories
Cars
Phones and Laptops
We used these phrases in a card sorting exercise with new participants, in which consumers physically organized the phrases for each product category based on importance to them. Positive phrases were placed on a board with concentric circles labeled “Most Important”, “Somewhat Important, and “Least Important.” Additionally, participants ranked any negative phrases on a scale from “Worst Possible” to “Tolerable.”
Survey.
Card sort participants completed a written survey featuring 7-point Likert scale spectra between contrasting product attributes, along with demographic, psychographic, and lifestyle questions.
Outputs
Personas.
We developed specific consumer personas based on the card sort and survey data.
BuyingRight Web App Concept.
This research represented an effective way of characterizing consumer value preferences, which is valuable both to producers and marketers, as well as consumers looking to clarify their own values and make more intentional buying decisions (we received this feedback from participants!). Accordingly, this project inspired the BuyingRight web app, which you can read about here.
Note: we conducted the research described above with a small pilot sample for validation purposes, and delivered a full research plan (pdf) to use the same methods with larger samples, which would yield more robust results.