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Conjoint Surveys

Support or oppose materiality claims, class certification, and damages arguments with data on consumer choice.

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  • 30+ Years of Industry Experience

  • 70,000+ Cases Served

  • 6,500+ Completed Trials

Delivering consumer decision-making insights to support your litigation strategies.

Conjoint is a marketing research method that measures how consumers value certain attributes or features of products. Conjoint surveys can also be useful in consumer class actions, false advertising cases, and patent or trademark litigation to determine price premiums, reasonable royalties, or other damages.

In conjoint surveys, consumers are presented with several rounds of choices between products that can vary across attributes and their specific features. The choices they make are used to determine which attributes consumers value, as well as the relative importance of those attributes and the prices consumers are willing to pay for specific features or combinations of features.

Conjoint survey experts often work as part of a team that includes economic experts. IMS offers conjoint surveys as a standalone service or in combination with other services, including rebuttals of other experts’ conjoint surveys. Our testifying survey experts have extensive experience designing, conducting, and analyzing surveys that withstand the scrutiny of complex, high-stakes litigation.

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How Conjoint Surveys Work

In a conjoint survey, relevant consumers are presented with sets of hypothetical products and asked to choose between them. For example, a “choice set” of vehicles may have three different vehicles that have different features across several attributes, including:

  • Trim levels: base, sport, premium
  • Climate control options: driver-controlled, front-seat controls, all-seat controls
  • Presence or absence of advanced safety features: no rear-view camera, rear-view camera
  • Price: $25K, $32K, $38K

Beyond a forced-choice set, there are multiple ways to more closely approximate market conditions, in which selecting a product is not always mandatory.

  • One method is to allow respondents to choose a “none” option from a set of product choices, meaning they would choose not to buy any of the products presented.
  • Another approach is to ask respondents whether they would actually purchase the product they selected, allowing the survey to gather data on both the valuation of attributes and products and whether respondents would make that purchase.

Respondents choose a product from each round of multiple-choice options. Conjoint survey experts then apply statistical modeling to determine which attributes are most likely to influence consumer choice.

Results from that statistical modeling reveal a myriad of data-based decision-making metrics, including the importance of one attribute compared with another, which specific feature of that attribute may dominate, and even how much people are willing to pay for a specific feature. These metrics, and many others that IMS conjoint experts employ, can be used as evidence of what consumers value and which attributes are most likely to affect consumer choice.

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Applications for Conjoint Surveys

In marketing research, conjoint surveys can help businesses understand which product features consumers value and what price point makes the most sense. In litigation, these surveys are helpful when a party needs information about consumers’ choices.

Conjoint surveys can be used to:

The testifying survey experts at IMS also provide rebuttals of conjoint surveys submitted by other parties.

Meet Our Conjoint Survey Experts

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Trust our team to deliver precise survey evidence and expert analysis that informs your litigation strategy.