Predictive Effectiveness of Alternative Preference Elicitation Techniques for Mobile Phones

In recent years, adoption of mobile phones has been very rapid all over India and accordingly mobile phone markets have been experiencing turbulence. Following unprecedented competition marketers have to deal with a high uncertainty regarding consumers’ preferences. Consumer preferences and information on product choice behaviour can be of significant value in development processes of innovative products or services. Once individual preference has been modeled, it has made the task of estimating impact of a change in product formulation / price easier. Accordingly, marketers’ depend on various preference elicitation methods, which reveal systematic components that underlie people’s evaluations of objects. In this paper it is attempted to present and review two alternative preference elicitation techniques, which are appropriate in the consumer preference judgment context. The study is based on an empirical work and a convenience sample of 200 mobile users in Delhi and the NCR (National Capital Region). It is concluded that despite methodological and contextual limitations conjoint analysis provides valuable insights into consumers’ preferences regarding selecting attributes of the mobile phone.