Should I include adcepts in preference share simulations?

New brands and product concepts with which consumers are not yet familiar may get lower preference shares in conjoint studies than their full market potential after advertising investment. That’s why in Brand-Price Trade-off experiments you need to add “adcepts” (“advertising concepts”) for NPDs. Respondents are first exposed to NPDs without seeing the adcepts, then they review concepts and do more choice tasks after exposure. The simulator then allows to model both “before adcept” and “after adcept” scenarios.

Adcepts can be a picture board, video, or a short description that helps inform respondents about your products. In market research, adcepts are commonly used as research stimuli to test concepts and ideas. Below is an example of adcept that shown to the respondents during choice-based exercise:

Investigating the effect of the adcepts in conjoint preference share simulation

When you are running simulations on a Brand-Price Trade-off experiment, you can find the Adcept column in the simulator as shown below.

By clicking on the adcept tab, you can select either No adcept or After adcept. The No adcept option performs simulations based on respondent preferences before being shown the adcept, while the After accept assumes the respondents complete the selections after the adcept was shown.

It is important to perform simulations both with and without adcepts, to discover both the current preference for the product, as well as preference after increased product awareness through advertising.

Typically, preference share for a product is higher when the adcept has been shown to consumers, due to increased product awareness.