Micro Modeling: Aligning Product Strategy with Market Reality

Addressing a Market Shift in Premium Product Expectations

What do you do when a key customer signals that your premium product no longer meets their rising expectations? You innovate. But ensuring your new product resonates with the broader market – while minimizing customer attrition – presents a challenge, especially when hands-on evaluation is a critical part of the decision-making process and prototype samples are limited.

Our client, a global leader in professional care solutions, faced this exact dilemma. They needed a data-driven approach to:

• Identify the “winning” product that would appeal to the broader market
• Simulate a real-world product evaluation experience despite limited prototypes
• Optimize pricing strategy based on customer preferences and trade-offs
• Assess the risks of replacing their existing product to mitigate customer loss

To navigate these complexities, they turned to us for insight.

Leveraging Micro Modeling and In-Depth Interviews for Deeper Insights

To extract the most value from a limited audience and accelerate insights, we employed our Micro Modeling approach, integrating a conjoint exercise within in-depth interviews (IDIs). This hybrid methodology combined trade-off data with qualitative insights, replicating real decision-making dynamics.

Our study included 100 hybrid phone-online survey interviews, where respondents were mailed product samples in advance. Participants completed a structured online conjoint exercise before engaging in an in-depth discussion about their decision-making process. By executing the conjoint during a virtual IDI, we were able to:

1. Capture robust quantitative insights—measuring product trade-offs and price sensitivity
2. Uncover the qualitative “why”— identifying emotional and practical drivers behind customer choices
3. Adapt questioning in real time, revealing underlying factors influencing sentiment and trade offs

Market Insights That Drive Strategy

The results were unexpected. While our client had a preferred prototype in mind, the data – and the deeper insights from IDIs – told a different story. Customers revealed opportunities and barriers associated with the enhanced product, shaping a more strategic path forward.

As a result, our client:

• Gained a clear understanding of the potential market impact of their product launch
• Identified key friction points and developed strategies to address customer resistance
• Optimized their messaging and positioning to ensure a successful product launch

Ultimately, our insights empowered them with the data and confidence to make informed decisions, ensuring their product launch was both successful and strategically sound.