Benefit Formation and Enhancement
54 Pages Posted: 23 Oct 2018
Date Written: September 26, 2018
Abstract
Distinguishing attributes from benefits is a challenging yet important task for product development. Attributes represent the physical and psychological inputs that comprise a product from which consumers seek benefits. Some attributes are benefit enabling in the sense that their presence signals that an offering is responsive to a benefit being sought, while their absence indicates that the product does not provide the benefit. Not all brands, for example, are seen as luxurious and specific brand names may be needed for consumers to consider an offering as providing luxury. Benefit formation hinges on these types of attributes being present, while other attributes only enhance a benefit that has already been formed. We develop a model to identify attributes that are critical to a benefit formation and apply it to three conjoint datasets. We show that identifying product features needed for benefit formation is important to product development activities.
Keywords: Latent Utility, Product Design, Characteristic Interactions
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