Belief - Based Marketing vs. Conjoint : An Illustration Using the Indian Mobile Phone Market

Many market research surveys conducted in the past have been engineering surveys and not genuine surveys of consumer beliefs. Brand managers should not only be able to simulate the market share of a newly designed product, but show the market share changes that result from changing consumer beliefs about existing products. The current research contrasted traditional conjoint with a variant that also collected data on consumer beliefs about what features a product has: the Boolean user belief (BUB) approach. This study compared BUB to the existing fixed data (FD) approach. Random assignment allocated 608 respondents one of the three methods: ACA, ACBC, and a self-explicated scale. Though the predictive accuracy of the research method improved using the BUB approach, the current research was more important, as an illustration, of how product feature surveys can impact market shares earlier in a product's life cycle than is possible now with most forms of conjoint. Where brand managers can single out one or two popular features that the public is not aware of, marketing messages can increase sales without a product re-design. In the case of traditional conjoint surveys, brand managers are limited to predicting changes in market share that would result from a new combination of features, rather than changing beliefs about existing products. If a manager finds that his/her product has a popular feature that consumers are unaware of, that feature becomes the advertising focus.