Category purchase tree

Understand shoppers and their complete path to the final purchase

A category purchase tree study helps you develop the most efficient and shopper-centric communications and strategies. With the gained insights and knowledge, you will be able to build a purchase decision tree and understand the ever-changing shopping decisions (such as planned or unplanned and in store or e-commerce purchases) for your products/services and for your competitors’.

Key insights

By building a category purchase tree and ranking features by attributes (such as importance, brand, size, price) you will gain a strong understanding on:

How shoppers arrive at your and your competitors’ products/services purchase
The factors, preferences, and needs influencing shoppers’ decision-making
How to feed shopper-centric communications based on their vision on product/service strengths and weaknesses
The reasons why shoppers choose a channel/retailer and their opinion on most/least important product/service qualities.

Most preferred features analysis example

Technical set-up

The core part of the questionnaire consists of a set of product features/attributes from which respondents are asked to choose their most important/preferred and the least important/preferred options among a list of predefined attributes. Thus, consumers choose their most and least preferred/ important items among a subset of 4-5 items.

Data analysis and reporting

MaxDiff and Latent Class analyses are used to calculate and identify preference scores and patterns.

With the MaxDiff analysis we:

Calculate preference scores within features’ level
Determine the derived importance factors for each feature
Understand the order of preference of several items.

A latent class analysis can also be performed to identify and profile consumer segments with characteristic preference patterns.

Example of most important attributes across SKUs

Category Mapping

Do you need to understand better your category before performing a Category Purchase Tree study?

Then Category Mapping can help you understand how consumers view your product, to which category they associate it, what factors influence their purchasing decisions, and which shopping missions and needs the product fulfills.

Learn more about how you can benefit from this research.

Learn more

Learn how the insights from category mapping helped our client

Pursuing category captaincy with retailers

“We came to Opeepl with a clear research idea, but after some in-depth conversations about our business challenges and expert suggestions by the Opeepl team we agreed to run a two-phase project to best meet our needs. Even though it extended the project timeline, the end solution was right for us”