Choice models: Multi Attribute

A brand’s ability to measure consumer attitudes provides a very helpful insight into what is driving consumer behavior. Generally a consumer’s attitude towards the various brands in the marketplace has a significant influence over their purchase and word-of-mouth actions. Positive attitudes will lead to positive behavior.

But attitudes are quite complex and have been formed possibly over many years of the consumer’s journey – based upon various brand exposures (touch-points), media and word-of-mouth communication, and possibly direct purchasing experience.

While it can be a challenging task to determine the various possible journey paths and range of brand touch-points – it is possible (via a market research survey) to get detailed information on the consumer’s attitude and build a multi-attribute attitude model.

Multi-attribute attitude model

As suggested by the name, this model breaks down the consumer’s overall attitude (that is, view of each brand) into smaller components. These components are the individual product features, functions and perceived benefits – which are collectively known as product attributes.

The structure of the market research questionnaire necessary to obtain the data to construct a multi-attribute attitude model would be:

• The researcher would determine (probably from initial focus groups) the key attributes of a product category
• Then for each main brand the respondent (consumer) would be asked to rate EACH brand for EACH key product attribute (on a scale, 1 to 7)
• The survey would then ask the respondent to also rate (on a scale) how important each attribute is to them in their purchase decision