You most likely have many substantial ideas on how you could improve your offering for your customers. Or you want to introduce a completely new offering and are wondering what really matters to your target group. As always, you only have limited time, energy, and budget available. Therefore, when further developing or creating your offering, you will inevitably have to make trade-offs. But please—on the right things!
Goethe already said:
“Important things must never be subordinated to unimportant ones.”
With Relative Importance Testing, in the spirit of a strategic approach, the goal is therefore to separate the wheat from the chaff among many ideas and possibilities: to discover new opportunities and choose the right options.
Only in this way can you design your offering around the aspects your customers truly value. First and foremost, this requires asking the right questions and listening carefully. What else you should keep in mind is explained in this article.
Your target group (sometimes) knows what matters to them—if you ask the right questions
To find out what people value, it is helpful to involve the people around you—above all your employees and customers—in the process. For the effort involved to be worthwhile and to gain valid insights into your customers’ lifeworlds, it is essential to ask targeted questions.
Open-ended feedback questions can be useful for generating new ideas. At the same time, customers often do not know the full range of possibilities for improving or redesigning an offering. Open questions can then lead to cognitive overload, causing respondents to rate more or less all (or none) of the options as interesting or valuable.
To make practical use of the answers, it is therefore crucial to compare the possible improvements and capture their relative relevance from the customer’s perspective. This reveals preferences between individual options, which you can then use as a basis for decision-making.
With targeted questions and well-considered options, you uncover what truly matters
Preparing a set of questions along with corresponding options aims to identify what is most important to customers—and what they would actually be willing to pay for. Depending on how many ideas and options you have already collected for your offering, you can choose between two approaches.
Option 1: With randomization
First, identify the aspects you believe provide high value to your customers. Then proceed as follows:
- Consider which value aspects your offering already delivers and which additional aspects you could add.
- Present four or five (not too many at once) of these aspects and ask the respondent to name the most important and least important, or to rank them by importance.
- Repeat step 2 with other value aspects randomly selected from your list. Continue until you have covered as many combinations as possible.
By analyzing the data, you can identify where your customers’ preferences lie and which aspects of your offering may be dispensable. If your offering includes only a few value aspects, the randomization step (step 3) can be omitted in favor of a more structured approach.
Option 2: Without randomization
If your offering, for example, covers four categories, you can formulate different questions related to these four categories.
- To determine the general priority of the categories, ask your target group to rank them according to relevance.
- Within each category, you may have several possible value aspects. Again, provide a small selection and ask respondents to choose the most and least important.
This approach allows you to assess not only the importance of the categories themselves but also the relative importance of the value aspects within them.
How can you use the results to improve your offering?
You now know which category deserves the most attention—without neglecting the others. You also know which value aspect within each category should be your focus.
This may imply a time-based focus: the more relevant the aspect, the more time you invest. It could also refer to frequency—for example, if online workshops are part of your offering, their frequency can signal greater or lesser focus. Budget allocation is another way to prioritize. To achieve the desired focus despite numerous possibilities, it is very important to consciously exclude certain aspects from the offering.
Avoid confusion: Keep the process as simple as possible
There are, of course, many ways to measure relative importance. For a start, design your questions in such a way that individual parameters are separated as clearly as possible, making the data easier to interpret.
This prevents imprecise conclusions, because the results tell you nothing more and nothing less than: “At this moment, the respondent assessed that they personally prefer option A over options B, C, and D, and that option D is least important.”
It is therefore essential to view findings within their context. For example, if you want to compare digital and analog offering elements, it may only make limited sense to measure their relative importance together—especially if the formats differ significantly. In such cases, it is often more relevant to determine which value aspects in the analog space and which elements in the digital space have the highest priority.
Important practical tips
- Ensure that questions are clearly formulated and easy to answer quickly. Do not overstretch the attention span of your counterpart—it can significantly influence responses.
- Your target group usually does not know what would truly improve their lives. This means that while people can express preferences, whether these actually prove to be preferences in practice—or whether an even better option exists—will only become clear later (or perhaps never). For example, aspect A may be rated most relevant, but in practice aspect B may deliver greater value. This misjudgment is particularly likely when the benefit occurs later, as people generally prefer immediate benefits over future ones.
- Therefore, when evaluating your results, keep in mind that aspects rated as less important are not necessarily less relevant. Perhaps a value aspect contributes more strongly to the long-term future of the business—e.g., because customers will only make use of it later. The information gained from interviews or questionnaires should always be interpreted within context and understood as indicators for validating or falsifying qualitative insights.
Talk to your customers, gather insights, and take your offering to the next level
Now that you have the first tools to generate initial quantitative insights, do not hesitate to apply them in order to shape the best possible offering for your ideal customers.
- Have you ever asked your target group about the relative importance of your offering elements in this way? What challenges did you face?
- If not, how have you gathered feedback so far?
- Which elements are you considering adding to your offering?
