The Smart Way to Evaluate and Bundle Features

Product manufacturers and service providers are always searching for cost-cutting strategies to stay competitive. One is to eliminate certain product or service features.

As a marketer, you’re well aware of the risks in reducing features; which may decrease the value of your product/service to consumers or dictate an adjustment to your pricing policy.

Smith-Dahmer Associates has fine-tuned a research approach that addresses those issues, reduces the risks, and even offers opportunities to build sales by providing consumers with products and services that include the features they want, instead of having to pay for features they don’t want.

Called Feature Bundling, this approach offers valuable, flexible and effective answers to the “what ifs” surrounding feature evaluation, ultimately providing actionable insights that can result in an optimized product or service.

Target consumers “build” your product/service from a toolbox of dollar-valued features—build it to various price points you specify.

Our Feature Bundling methodology allows up to 30 product or service features to be classified into four distinct groups: Important Commodity, High Value, Low Value and Niche.

Feature Bundling is a quantitative methodology that can be conducted online. It utilizes feedback from consumers pre-qualified by their interest in a low, medium or high priced product/service.

It can be customized to any industry where products or services are offered with packages of features at incremental price levels.

This research helps you understand the relative importance of specific features to potential customers at different price points. The respondent “builds” the product or service within their budget, prioritizes the features and indicates the value to him or her. This approach also identifies which combinations of features are most desirable to consumers.

Maximizing profit is another benefit of this research, it is determined by taking the “feature value” from the research and comparing it to the cost to produce that feature. The difference—called Feature Margin—can offer cost-cutting options.

Feature Bundling reduces risk by providing real world, actionable insights regarding consumer biases and preferences for your product/service features. It delivers knowledge that leads to better answers, not more questions.

With Feature Bundling your research, development, raw material, manufacturing, distribution, marketing and promotional funds are invested smarter. Product/service costs can be lowered, or prices increased, with more confidence. The “upsell potential” is identified—that’s extremely useful at the point of sale.

We invite you to learn more of our depth and breadth, to discover SDA: the full service, custom marketing research firm whose experience and expertise, tools and techniques, processes and people are committed to the power of Feature Bundling.

To learn more about SDA, contact us or go to our home page.