Tim will be presenting at the Advanced Research Techniques Forum in San Francisco on June 8th at 8:00 am.   

Accounting for Customer Characteristics—A New Way to Explore the Difference between Stated and Derived Importance

We work with physicians to understand what influences their diagnostic and treatment decisions. We’ve known for years that what physicians say most influences their decisions isn’t always the thing that most influences their behavior. For example, a physician might say that “safety” most influences what they decide to prescribe, but results from a choice task (or a correlation analysis) show that it is really “efficacy” that prompts them to prescribe. What we have learned is that the details of the patient being treated often drives this disconnect, so we include patient characteristics in our choice tasks. Still, measures of stated and derived importance are typically collected in separate tasks. Our new approach combines data collection into one task. The physician participating in a choice task first indicates how they would prescribe based on a series of patient and product features and then immediately tells us which patient characteristics most influenced their decision. This simple approach generates data that lets us explore both stated and derived importance for patient characteristics by brand for both new and existing products. These data have clear value for both brand positioning and resource allocation.