In this paper an international research project dealing with the country-of-origin effect is presented. Using individualized conjoint analysis with dollar-metric paired comparisons the market values of middle-class cars from different countries of ori- gin have been determined. The countries where data have been collected are Great Britain, France, Spain and Germany. In total, nearly 900 interviews have been conducted. Country of origin is supposed to be an important product attribute especially for complex or for high fashion products. Product evaluations based on "made in" are considered as consequences of quality assessments, but also of patriotism etc. In the last 25 years about 60 relevant studies have been published, most of them in the U.S.A. The findings have been inconsistent and different research paradigms have been used. Most of these studies suffer from the heavy use of convenience samples, the problem of demand effects, and the missing confirmation of the effect in managerially relevant metrics. Conjoint analysis has proved to be a valuable marketing research instrument for many strategic decisions. Conjoint analysis with individualized sets of attributes improves the predictive power of this approach. EDP-assisted interviewing is necessary and useful in this context. The paper is divided into six parts. In the first section the relevance of country-of- origin research is shown and our research goal is presented. Then the state of relevant country-of-origin literature is summarized and open questions are shown. In the third part individualized conjoint analysis is proposed as a means to analyze the relative importance of country of origin in the buying process of consumers. In section four we present our research methodology. Part five deals with the main results for the analyzed product. Finally we show some implications for companies and research.
Product designing and pricing are two of the most important marketing decisions. Test marketing is one strategy to get better informations to evaluate the referent alternatives. Pre-test marketing evaluation is another research strategy which becomes more and more popular due to its favourable cost-time-accuracy profile. Still less expensive and time consuming are laboratory simulations based on conjoint and other decision analysis approaches such as information display matrix treatments A powerful new package of an interactive decision analysis system (IDAS) is presented. This approach amalgamates a realistic display matrix elaboration, a completely individualised conjoint analysis and some validity checks. The system develops understandable trade-offs of product features and prices on an individual level and offers opportunities for benefit segmentation. The system is interactive; within a researcher module the product area, the attributes and the levels to be analysed may be defined, within the respondent module one works through a sequence of tasks, thus delivering to the researcher the informations required. These informations allow to optimise the product features and price.
Many consumer decisions are based on evaluation processes within families with many persons involved. Up to today, this multi-person character of most decisions concerning durables has not been taken into consideration adequately. In addition to that real decisions on durables are mostly multi-stage decisions. For both aspects a new measurement methodology is presented and applied to a sample of households. Every individual's influence on the different stages of family decision is quantified as regards the products cars, dish washers, and video-recorders. The findings reveal a comparatively high percentage of syncretic decision processes and offer insights in the family decision process which are important for media-planning as well as media copy decisions.
Within the paper we present a stochastic brand choice price model which is a real decision model. The model is applied to the German potato- products 5 market using G&I-consumer panel data. The model is parameterised and its validity is elaborated. Based on the estimations a robust market share model is proposed demonstrating the effect of different brands and its prices on the brands market share.