SKIM/Sawtooth Software European Conference and Training Event April 9-12, 2013

Transcription

1 SKIM/Sawtooth Software European Conference and Training Event April 9-12, 2013 Berlin Marriott Hotel Inge-Beisheim-Platz 1, Berlin, Germany SKIM (The Netherlands) and Sawtooth Software (USA) are pleased to announce their 2013 European Conference and Training Event. The European event consists of 4 days of workshops, tutorials, and conference papers. It brings together market research practitioners and academics to learn about and discuss quantitative methods in marketing research. Typical attendance has been 60 to 80 participants. Topics include: Conjoint/Choice Analysis Market Simulation/Product Optimization Market Segmentation Questionnaire Programming/Construction Maximum Difference Scaling (MaxDiff) Instructors include: Bryan Orme, President, Sawtooth Software Keith Chrzan, Senior Vice President, Sawtooth Analytics, Sawtooth Software Aaron Hill, Vice President, Client Services, Sawtooth Software Jeroen Hardon, Research Consultant, SKIM Stefan Ammerlaan, Research Consultant, SKIM 1

2 Training Event and Conference Overview April 9-11 features simultaneous breakout sessions (select which breakout rooms to attend). All attendees will be together for the final conference sessions on April 12. Breakout Room 1 Sawtooth Software Instructors Breakout Room 2 Sawtooth Software Instructors Breakout Room 3 SKIM Instructors Tuesday, April 9 (Training) CBC Workshop (Chrzan & Hill) CBC Workshop (cont.) MBC Workshop (Orme & Hill) MBC Workshop (cont.) Wednesday, April 10 (Training) CBC Workshop (cont.) CBC Workshop (cont.) MBC Workshop (cont.) MBC Workshop (cont.) (None) A Practitioner s View Part 1 (Ammerlaan) PM (14:00 15:50): Product/Portfolio Optimization (Hardon) PM (16:10 18:00): Pricing from a Company, Consumer and Research Perspective (Hardon) Thursday, April 11 (Training) SSI Web Programming (Hill & Baker) PM (14:00 15:50): Introduction to Market Simulations (Hill) PM (16:10 18:00): Introduction to MaxDiff (Hill) AM (9:00 10:50): Advanced MaxDiff (Chrzan) AM (11:10 13:00): Advanced ACBC (Orme) Experimental Design for CBC (Chrzan & Orme) A Practitioner s View Part 2 (Ammerlaan) PM (14:00 15:50): Advanced CBC Designs (Hardon) PM (16:10 18:00): Rocket Science CBC (Hardon) *Complimentary After Hours Event: (Berlin TV Tower Restaurant) Friday, April 12 (Conference All Combined) 9:00-9:10 Intro remarks 9:10-10:55 Session 1 Speakers Komendant Nowakowska/Retzer Belyakov/Sedova (Break 10:55-11:15) 11:15-13:00 Session 2 Speakers Tien/ Müller Pupke/Rausch Arenoe/van der Rest (Lunch 13:00-14:30) 14:30-16:15 Session 3 Speakers Nierobisch Moore/Wirth Kurz/ Koehn (Break 16:15-16:40) 16:40-17:50 Session 4 Speakers Orme/Johnson Cordella/van der Wagt 17:50-18:00 Closing remarks Pricing: CBC Workshop 1100 (2 days, April 9-10) MBC Workshop 1100 (2 days, April 9-10) Tutorials 550 per day (includes your choice of 2-hour and 4-hour classes, April 10-11) Conference Event 550 (April 12) Late Fees (payment received after February 15): Add 100 per day * For the Berlin TV Tower restaurant event, additional guests cost 75 (please contact us separately to arrange). 2

3 Descriptions of Workshops and Tutorials Tuesday-Wednesday, April 9-10 CBC Workshop (Breakout Room 1, 9:00 to 18:00, 16 hours) Keith Chrzan & Aaron Hill, Sawtooth Software Dive in with Keith and Aaron for an intensive, hands-on, 2-day workshop featuring Sawtooth Software s CBC program. This course covers questionnaire construction (design), analysis, and market simulations for Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC). Attendees will develop CBC questionnaires within the SSI Web platform, as well as participate in an analysis exercise within small teams. The emphasis will be on practical aspects of CBC, with a focus on best practices. This course is intended for those who are relatively new to CBC and conjoint methods. It is not necessary to own any software to participate: a demo license will be given. Attendees must bring their own Windowscapable laptops. MBC Workshop (Breakout Room 2, 9:00 to 18:00, 16 hours) Bryan Orme & Aaron Hill, Sawtooth Software Menu-Based Choice (MBC) is a relatively new and flexible choice modeling approach for solving a variety of multi-check (combinatorial) menu-selection problems. Examples include: choosing options to put on an automobile, selections from a restaurant menu, banking options, configuring an insurance policy, purchasing bundled vs. a la carte services including mobile phones, internet, and cable. Using the MBC software requires expertise in terms of experimental design for conjoint exercises, developing MBC surveys using advanced HTML/Javascripting, and some data processing to prepare the files in.csv-format for analysis within MBC. MBC has a built-in simulator and can also automatically export Excel simulators. This course is intended for those with a strong background in discrete choice and econometric modeling. It is not necessary to own any software to participate: a demo license will be given. Attendees must bring their own Windowscapable laptops. The learning is enhanced by working with real practice datasets, including a modeling challenge where attendees compete to fit actual holdout data. Wednesday, April 10 A Practitioner s View (Part 1): From Business Question to Set-up (Breakout Room 3, 9:00 to 13:00, 4 hours) Stefan Ammerlaan, SKIM Step up to the plate and join Stefan Ammerlaan on his quest to crack the shell of research practice. In this first, semiindependent part of the tutorial (4 hours), Stefan will showcase a triad of conjoint case studies to discuss the translation from business question to research set-up, including choice of method, best practices and pitfalls. This tutorial is meant to be an interactive workshop and your active involvement is appreciated. Product / Portfolio Optimization (Breakout Room 3, 14:00 to 15:50, 2 hours) Jeroen Hardon, SKIM In the course of a 2-hour workshop, Jeroen Hardon will demonstrate how to use results from choice-based research for product- and portfolio optimization practice. Together you identify what it is that you need to optimize on: ask yourself the question What does optimal mean to me?. Jeroen will take the lead in discussing considerations and limitations of optimizing using CBC, and how optimization exercises can be approached. 3

4 Pricing from a Company, Consumer and Research Perspective - an Overview (Breakout Room 3, 16:10 to 18:00, 2 hours) Jeroen Hardon, SKIM In this 2-hour workshop Jeroen Hardon looks at pricing. Join him to see how companies may deal with pricing and what challenges they face; how consumers may perceive and react to prices, and which tools we as researchers can use to bring both together. A few pricing research tools in particular will be looked at, i.e. Choice-Based Conjoint, Van Westendorp, Gabor Granger, etc. You will gain a quick-and-dirty understanding of the differences among the approaches, their (dis)advantages, and when and how to use them. Thursday, April 11 SSI Web Programming (Breakout Room 1, 9:00 to 13:00, 4 hours) Aaron Hill & Gary Baker, Sawtooth Software Most Sawtooth Software users recognize the value that the SSI Web platform delivers in terms of conjoint analysis and MaxDiff. Fewer users have actually explored and realized the power included in the standard survey software aspect of the platform. SSI Web is a point-and-click system for those who wish to remain in the point-and-click world. But, for power users who know some HTML, Javascript, and Perl, the SSI Web system takes on new characteristics and life. Aaron and Gary will show a variety of examples that take advantage of the more powerful aspects of the program. Example studies will be shared with attendees. Introduction to Market Simulations (Breakout Room 1, 14:00 to 15:50, 2 hours) Aaron Hill, Sawtooth Software The ability to deliver a what-if market simulator to managers and clients has been one of the main reasons conjoint analysis has found such success. Simulators make the data relevant and actionable to business and other economic/planning problems. Aaron will introduce the basic math behind simulators before demonstrating how simulators may be used for tackling practical and common business problems. He will focus on three types of simulators: those using Sawtooth Software s established tools (SMRT and Online Simulator) as well as a simple example in Excel. The pros and cons of different simulation approaches will be discussed. Introduction to MaxDiff (Breakout Room 1, 16:10 to 18:00, 2 hours) Aaron Hill, Sawtooth Software Researchers are commonly asked to measure the importance or preference for items (brands, statements, attributes, political candidates, etc.) Commonly used ratings scales have big weaknesses, including lack of discrimination and scale use bias. A recent technique called MaxDiff (also known as best-worst scaling) virtually solves both of these problems. MaxDiff asks respondents to simply choose best and worst items from small sets (such as 4 or 5 items). No rating scales are involved! MaxDiff is quickly becoming a mainstream technique among quantitative market researchers. It also is seen as a strong technique for segmenting your market. Come see how easy it is to design, develop, and analyze MaxDiff studies within Sawtooth Software s SSI Web platform. Advanced MaxDiff (Breakout Room 2, 9:00 to 10:50, 2 hours) Keith Chrzan, Sawtooth Software If you already have experience fielding and analyzing MaxDiff studies, extend your knowledge by attending this advanced session taught by Keith Chrzan. Keith will cover experimental design principles, design matrix coding, score 4

5 estimation, rescaling approaches, comparisons to other methods (ratings, Q-Sort, constant sum, magnitude estimation), market segmentation via MaxDiff results, and anchored scaling techniques (both Lattery and Louviere approaches). Advanced ACBC (Breakout Room 2, 11:10 to 13:00, 2 hours) Bryan Orme, Sawtooth Software Adaptive CBC (ACBC) is growing in popularity, largely because of its ability to engage respondents in a thoughtful interview that appears to the survey taker to be learning and honing in on one s preferences. It is especially well-suited for problems involving about five attributes or more. During this session, ACBC s co-developer, Bryan Orme, will cover subject matter not discussed in introductory sessions. Topics include: dealing with prohibitions, details of utility estimation, investigating interaction effects, piecewise regression for price functions, and advanced ACBC questionnaires (dropping attributes and dropping levels). He ll also give a sneak peek into what Sawtooth Software is planning for the next version of ACBC. Experimental Design for CBC (Breakout Room 2, 14:00 to 18:00, 4 hours) Keith Chrzan & Bryan Orme, Sawtooth Software Sawtooth Software s CBC system makes it seem almost automatic to design CBC experiments. This session explains how and why the CBC experimental design routines do what they do, and how you should select among competing designs. We ll discuss traditional design diagnostics (D-efficiency) and why the most D-efficient designs are not always the ones that work best. The fact of the matter is that researchers deal with human respondents, and humans have limitations and tendencies. CBC designs must accommodate humans, not just consider raw statistics and economic theory. Recent presentations at the 2012 Sawtooth Software conference focused on experimental design for CBC and we ll share highlights from those discussions. We ll also show you some tricks to go beyond what the standard software seems to permit, including importing custom designs. A Practitioner s View (Part 2): From Data to Answer (Breakout Room 3, 9:00 to 13:00, 4 hours) Stefan Ammerlaan, SKIM Step up to the plate again and join Stefan Ammerlaan for another 4 hours on his quest to crack the shell of research practice. This second part takes the set-up as given and guides you from the derived data to the right answer. This interactive workshop intends to get you a foothold in the application of various analysis techniques, like Latent Class and HB, and interpretation of the results. Advanced CBC Designs (Breakout Room 3, 14:00 to 15:50, 2 hours) Jeroen Hardon, SKIM Assuming you are an experienced user of CBC research, Jeroen Hardon would like to get you on board for this 2-hour tutorial on advanced applications. He will focus on a number of challenging and interesting extensions of choice modeling, including: alternative-specific designs, bundling, optional choice models, and pricing models with special constraints. In this advanced session, Jeroen intends to show you some of the more interesting and useful possibilities within the family of discrete choice methods. The techniques described usually involve custom work breaching the standards provided by Sawtooth Software s CBC suite. Rocket Science CBC (Breakout Room 3, 16:10 to 18:00, 2 hours) Jeroen Hardon, SKIM A somewhat dramatic title partly meant as self-mockery, but surely also indicating the complex nature of this tutorial. Jeroen Hardon will take you for a 2-hour spin, leaving the scenic route, to show you some of the more adventurous CBC applications. He aims not to present proven ways but instead stir the discussion and inspire. This will be done based on a variety of experimental conjoint solutions to challenging business questions. 5

6 Friday, April 12 Introductory Remarks (9:00-9:10) Session 1 (9:10-10:55): Various Classifiers for MaxDiff Based Segmentations Lech Komendant, 4P Research Mix Main Conference Session Abstracts Segmentation projects often involve creating a classification tool for a client. Many people think that building such a tool for a choice based segmentation (such as MaxDiff) is a serious chore. In my presentation I will show several methods of accomplishing this job. Some of them quick and easy, some more sophisticated and demanding. I compare them in terms of classification quality and practical requirements in different research situations. I will consider using them for MaxDiff, Q-sort, and full ranking segmentations. Extending Cluster Ensemble Analysis via Semi-Supervised Learning Ewa Nowakowska, GfK Polonia Joseph Retzer, MarketTools Inc. The cluster ensemble methodology is extended in a direct and practical way to improve the consensus solution. We augment the set of ensemble partitions with those derived from the supervised learning analysis, Random Forests. RF partitions incorporate useful profiling information directly indicative of specific target measures. CCEA is then used to improve consensus partition stability and cluster quality. The resultant cluster solution is of high quality, easier to predict, and more useful for the marketing manager. Heuristic Algorithm for TURF Analysis Dmitry Belyakov, Synovate Comcon Anastasia Sedova, Synovate Comcon We introduce a Heuristic Algorithm for TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) analysis. The Algorithm uses a population of individuals as with Genetic Algorithms, but it uses swapping items for the best individual instead of crossover. Its advantages help to minimize estimation time when a long list of items (SKUs, flavors etc.) is analyzed and also allows finding a minimum possible list of items which covers the defined share of a sample. Break (10:55-11:15) Session 2 (11:15-13:00): Efficient Modeling by Applying Powerful Price Functions Matthias Tien, Ipsos GmbH Susanne Müller, Ipsos GmbH The focus will be showing how alternative approaches for modeling price functions can solve a multitude of challenges: - save model parameters and thus improve model stability 6

7 - better reflect price response patterns, i.e. more realistic simulation results We will introduce variants of linear and log-linear price functions and discuss the benefit of integrating price threshold parameters into the model as well. This leads to realistic model discontinuity often observed in price volume curves. Coding of Choice Files When Using a Consideration Set Karsten Pupke, TNS Infratest Forschung GmbH Maximilian Rausch, TNS Infratest Forschung GmbH Price or Portfolio optimization studies face the problem of large lists of products which are available in a category. This issue is often handled by asking the relevant set of products for each respondent and then only running the discrete choice model based on this subset of products. This presentation shows ways of handling the data of studies where each respondent saw only a subset of the products. Different approaches are shown how the choice data can be coded to run the HB estimation. Capturing Time Dynamics in Hotel Reservation Choice Bjorn Arenoe, Hotelschool The Hague Research Centre Jean-Pierre van der Rest, Hotelschool The Hague Research Centre The authors present the results of a conjoint study undertaken in collaboration with Hilton Hotels, focusing on the preference formation of hotel room bookings. The challenge was to accurately capture the time-dynamics of such a process as the perceived risk (e.g. the necessity to make last minute changes or cancellation) from the perspective of the guest decreases as the day-of-arrival gets nearer. Lunch (13:00-14:30) Session 3 (14:30-16:15): Horizontal Brand Architecture Impacts on Private Label Brand Equity Tim Nierobisch, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Private label brand strategies have proliferated across price segments, ranging from economy to premium lines. For winning the fight against national brands, retailers are introducing umbrella sub-branded product lines for further consumer need satisfaction and market penetration. This study investigates the impact of sub-branding on private label portfolios, concerning customer based brand equity and consumer switching behavior. A choice based conjoint analysis of products across three categories of the FMCG market is conducted. HB Priors Do Matter But When and How Exactly? Chris Moore, GfK NOP Ralph Wirth, GfK SE The core strength of Hierarchical Bayes (HB) is its ability to borrow information from the population in order to better inform individual utility estimation. How much individual estimates are influenced by population information depends strongly on the settings of the HB prior parameters. However, many practitioners only use the default HB settings. Our paper investigates how changing the prior settings affects the results, and how their influence depends on important study parameters, such as the number of parameters to estimate and the sample size. We will derive concrete suggestions from the analysis of empirical data sets and a Monte Carlo simulation study. Hierarchical Bayes Regression Using Large Datasets without Repeated Responses Peter Kurz and Karolin Koehn, TNS Infratest Forschung GmbH We show how datasets with single responses may be transformed and used with hierarchical Bayesian regression techniques that normally need repeated answers from each respondent. Large datasets (e.g. big data) are more available wherever we go. Grouping respondents by preference structure could bring better 7

8 insight regarding heterogeneity, because small sample size is no longer an issue. The normally used multiple regression techniques don t take account of heterogeneity and therefore often fail to explain the real data structure. With such a grouping of respondents, the advantages of hierarchical Bayes techniques to derive pseudo individual regression coefficients can be brought into new fields of data analysis where we haven t used them in the past. Break (16:15-16:40) Session 4 (16:40-17:50): Can We Shorten CBC Interviews without Sacrificing Quality? Bryan Orme, Sawtooth Software Rich Johnson, Sawtooth Software Kurz & Binner presented a paper at the 2012 Sawtooth Software Conference in which they concluded that most CBC questionnaires could have been shorter without sacrificing information. We analyzed three CBC datasets, looking for ways that respondents could be identified early in the questionnaire and terminated early (because they are no longer providing new and useful information). We focused on RLH (consistency), Long Series of Repeated Answers, Chi-Square, and Short Response Times. But, we found it difficult to reliably identify respondents on-the-fly (at the moment of interviewing them) who could be terminated. However, we did find ways to flag potentially bad respondents after the data have been collected. MBC + LC: Is It Worth a Try? Paolo Cordella, SKIM Kees van der Wagt, SKIM The aim of this paper is to improve Menu-Based Conjoint (MBC) methodology by using segmentation analysis. MBC problems typically involve the specification of cross effects. Once a cross effect is specified, it s assumed to be the case and is included for all respondents. The authors investigate whether using Latent Class to identify (and only use) segment specific cross-effects in MBC modelling can help the (internal) predictive validity. Closing Remarks (17:50-18:00) 8

9 Conference Registration Please visit to enroll. Enrollment cost is per full day of attendance. Prices are listed on page 2 of this brochure. Hotel Registration The event will be held at the Berlin Marriott, with a promotional rate of 155 single/ 175 double (breakfast included). Berlin Marriott Hotel Inge-Beisheim-Platz Berlin, Germany Register with the hotel by following the link provided in your online conference registration (link provided above). Or, you may directly dial the hotel at Be sure to mention that you are with the SKIM/Sawtooth Software event to get the promotional rate. You must register with the hotel by March 15 to be guaranteed the promotional group rate. Questions? Rombout Pruim (The Netherlands) r.pruim@skimgroup.com Bryan Orme (USA) bryan@sawtoothsoftware.com Disabilities: SKIM and Sawtooth Software are committed to providing equal access to our meetings for all attendees. If you are an attendee with a disability and require meeting room/program accommodations (wheelchair access, hearing or visual assistance, dietary restrictions, etc.) please contact us and a member of our staff will ensure that appropriate access arrangements are made. If you have specific disability-related needs for your hotel sleeping room, please be sure to communicate those directly to the hotel when you make your reservation. In an effort to provide the highest quality of service to all attendees, we require that details of all access requests be communicated to the Sawtooth Software office at least 14 days in advance of the beginning of the meeting. 9