Conjoint analysis, also called trade-off analysis, helps you understand how individual features contribute to the overall value of the product. When considering different product attributes (features, aesthetics, design, pricing, etc.), most survey respondents can’t easily determine or describe the relative importance to them of different attributes. For any set of product attributes, for example, respondents could say they are all important. Adding more difficulty to assessing importance, respondents’ opinions may vary when considering specific product attributes on their own compared to their perceptions of that attribute in combination with others.

Conjoint analysis is based on the premise that the relative importance of product attributes is more accurately measured when evaluated together rather than by themselves individually. Conjoint analysis calculates average utilities that offer rough estimates of how important each of the product dimensions or values is in a purchase decision. Price is usually included as an attribute in trade-off analysis, giving the ability to predict which features or attributes have the highest value to respondents. Additionally, Polaris creates a “market simulator" with the ability to "predict" the market share of new products and to gauge changes in market share by changing attributes for existing products in the market.

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