How to Set Up a Brand-Price Trade-Off Study
Setting up a Brand-Price Trade-Off (BPTO) is easy with its intuitive, step-by-step interface. This checklist guide will navigate you through the process, ensuring you get the most out of your experiment.
Prepare your inputs
A BPTO study requires the following inputs:
- A list of SKUs, which includes competitor SKUs, your current SKUs, and your NPD SKUs.
- The name, packshot, and potential prices for each SKU.
- Adcepts to introduce your NPDs.
To maximise the value of a BPTO, it is recommended to:
- Include at least four competitor/current SKUs that cover 80% of the market, especially salient SKUs from an emerging brand.
- List price points on a consistent scale and use the same unit, e.g. $20.99 per 800g or £22.50 per 1 litre.
- Present packshot images in consistent size and quality.
- Assign at least five potential price points for each SKU. These price points should cover all potential prices you want to investigate.
Describe your study
- Consider renaming your experiment to avoid confusion.
- Name your product category, e.g. carbonated fruit drinks.
Import SKUs and prices (optional)
- Import your lists of SKUs and prices from an Excel sheet under Our SKUs, Competitor SKUs, and Our NPD SKUs accordingly. The first column in each row should contain the name of your SKU, followed by potential prices for that SKU in the subsequent columns.
Add or modify SKUs
- Add the SKUs if you skipped the previous step.
- Click on the image icon and select Add fancy formatting and pictures to level name to upload the packshot image for each SKU.
- Add a maximum of 20 SKUs to keep the survey length optimal.
- Ensure you have at least four competitor and current SKUs to present respondents with currently popular choices.
Add adcepts
Adcepts aid in presenting your new products to respondents through picture boards, videos, or short descriptions.
- Upload adcepts for each NPD to familiarise respondents with the new products.
- Adjust the minimum view time for your adcepts to ensure respondents thoroughly consider each proposition.
Specify potential prices
There are rules for prices in a BPTO study that must be followed:
- Assign at least three price points per SKU.
- Display each price point for at least two SKUs.
- Avoid any gaps between assigned price points.
To specify prices:
- Add or modify potential prices for each SKU by clicking the button.
- Click on to check the distribution of prices assigned to each SKU, ensuring they adhere to the BPTO pricing rules.
Choose respondents
BPTO studies typically require between 100 and 1,000 participants, depending on the total number of SKUs and price points. Conjointly offers several options to get participants for your experiments:
- Bring your own respondents: Use a list of your customers or leads, or source respondents from elsewhere or integrate with your other survey tool.
- Predefined panel: Use a specific pre-defined panel of respondents (including those who are pre-defined for your company). Data collection is managed by the Conjointly fieldwork team.
- Self-serve sample A: Automatically and urgently invite respondents from global panel networks. Target them by location, demographics, and profiling data. Set your own price per complete and manage your own quotas.
- Managed general sample: Buy responses from our panel networks. Target them by location, demographics, and profiling questions. Data collection is managed by the Conjointly fieldwork team.
- Email campaign: Send survey invitations and reminders via Conjointly to your own contacts.
Add diagnostics questions
Diagnostic questions allow deeper exploration of people’s attitudes toward the SKUs.
- Hover over the comment icon next to each question to view the detail.
- Choose your desired questions. By default, the Van Westendorp question is selected.
Customise your experiment or add profiling questions
Your experiment is now ready for launch. Select if you would like to change question text, add a redirect link, perform other customisations, or add more questions for customer segment profiling.
Review, approve, launch
When you are ready to launch your experiment, click on and proceed securely with your payment.
Conjointly manages the response collection process once you have launched your experiment. We will notify you when your survey report is ready.
Tips for setting up prices in BPTO
When creating a BPTO study, error messages will be displayed when your specified prices do not meet the three pricing rules mentioned above.
To adhere to the price rules, Conjointly recommends the following steps:
Extend the price ranges of the SKUs
You can show more prices above or below the base price of the SKUs in the choice experiment, to ensure that there are at least three price points per SKU and all price points are shown for at least two SKUs. Later, during analysis, you can still specify the appropriate price points of each SKU.
Fill in gaps between price points
Manually select all the price points between the original price points, or click the button to fill the gaps instantly. This step enhances the granularity of simulation results.
Merge close price points
Click on the button to merge close price points. Additionally, you may want to reduce the total number of tested prices by manually merging other price points. For example, instead of testing $10, $11, $12, $13, $14, $15, $16, you can test only $10, $12, $14 and merge $11, $13, $15 to either the next higher or lower price point.
You can do this because price is treated as a numerical variable in the Brand-Price Trade-Off, and you can simulate the intermediary prices later on. This approach will reduce the number of responses recommended, as this is estimated based on the number of price points in the Brand-Price Trade-Off set-up.
