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Monadic Vs Sequential Monadic Survey Design

Market research 04 12
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Table of Contents

Survey Design determines how your audience will interact and how it influences them to respond. We will be discussing two survey designs, these are, Monadic and Sequential Monadic Survey Design.

Monadic Vs Sequential Monadic Survey Design1

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01

What is Monadic Survey Design?

When you use a Monadic Survey Design you are introducing a single concept to the respondents. After presenting the individual concept you need to ask the respondents relevant questions to evaluate the concept. The aim is to allow respondents to focus on one stimulus to encourage decisions that result in business decisions.

In the Monadic survey, design concepts are tested individually to gather data on each concept. You need to do this with all the concepts you the respondents to evaluate. After collecting the feedback you can compare the results of each concept. Comparing the result can help you find the winning concept.

Monadic Concept Testing: This test helps you gain customer insight into products. Respondents focus on one product at a time. With this testing, you can gather knowledge about the customer’s overall impression of the product.

Monadic Price Tests: In this test, you present the respondent’s individual products with a single price. As a result of the test, you can gather customer’s acceptance, purchase intent, preference, etc. Only a single price is shown in order to prevent any influence respondents may have from other pricing options.

Advantages of Monadic Survey Design

Dive deep: The respondents are given time to focus on a single concept for some time. This gives you the advantage of asking in-depth details about the concept. You can follow up with many questions to get a detailed and elaborate review of the concept.

No Influence: Your audience is presented with a single concept. This prevents them from being influenced by other concepts. They focus on the concept at hand and give their honest opinion on the concept. This also eliminates order bias.

Short Survey: The questionnaire is short with only an individual concept being the focus. The respondents feel more encouraged to complete the survey when there are fewer questions. This influences the completion rate of the survey.

Example

As a cereal company, you want to launch a unique, fun, and healthy cereal for adults. You have two recipes for the cereal. However, you can only launch one recipe because you have resources for only one product.

You need an evaluation of both the cereals to decide which one is more appealing to the consumers. SO you have to design a survey that can provide you, your consumer’s overall evaluation of the products. Monadic Survey Design can help you go through the process of evaluating both concepts in isolation to determine which one to move forward with.

Drawbacks

One of the biggest drawbacks of Monadic Survey Design is that it requires a large sample size. The process involves showing each respondent only one concept. This implies that if you want to test more concepts you need to grow your sample size. That is, if for one concept you need 100 participants for 2 concepts you will need 200 respondents, and so on.

Moreover, with the size of the sample group increasing targeting the audience will become costlier.

02

What is Sequential Monadic Survey Design?

When you use Sequential Monadic Survey Design you test either all the potential concepts or a fraction of them to the respondents. At the very least you present two concepts to the respondents. This implies that while one concept is shown at a time, the respondents are also shown an alternative concept.

Following the presentation of the concepts, the respondents are asked questions. Each concept is followed up by the same questions. This helps in comparing the results to identify the winning concept.

Presenting different concepts and asking the same questions can help you understand why the respondents prefer one concept over the other.

Advantages of Sequential Monadic Design

Small Sample Size: Sequential monadic survey design can test on a small sample size. Respondents are shown several concepts which makes it possible for them to respond to multiple concepts.

Cost-effective: The smaller sample size makes the testing more affordable. With lesser respondents, it is easier to collect responses thus decreasing the investment in a survey.

Less Time Required: It also helps that it takes less time to complete the task. Responses are collected in less time with a small sample size.

Example

Say you have a successful pizza business in your district. You discover a new cheese introduced in the market. The price is half of what you usually purchase and the quality appears to be the same. However, you want to make sure that the quality of your pizzas is not compromised because of the cheese. So, you decide to test it in order to not disappoint your target consumers with the new cheese.

The best way to test if it is better than the one you use is to use the concept of sequential monadic survey design. This will help you identify the difference between the two products. Also, you will understand if the new recipe will be accepted in the market or not.

As a result, you will lower the risk of adopting a new recipe that may not succeed in the market.

Drawbacks

Asking the same question about different products to the same audience can frustrate them. This may result in a low completion rate. Testing multiple concepts together can lead to a lengthy survey. Also, respondents may feel reluctant to answer the same questions multiple times.

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03

Using Monadic and Sequential Monadic Survey Design

You can use Monadic Survey Design when you have few concepts that you want to test. Also, ensure that you have a large sample size to test the concepts on. Monadic survey design requires time because one respondent evaluates one concept. So you can use the testing method when you are not restricted by time.

You can use Sequential Monadic Survey Design when there are more concepts to test. The testing method is cost-effective and requires less time to complete the test. So, the test is better used when you have a low budget or when you have limited time to get results.

Monadic Vs Sequential Monadic Survey Design2

04

FAQs

A Sequential monadic refers to the evaluation of two or more concepts one after another. The respondents are shown one concept at the same time as an alternative concept is shown. The respondents are then asked the same questions about each concept to determine which one is the winning concept.

A Monadic test refers to when individual concepts are tested in isolation. The participants are asked questions based on the concept they were shown. One respondent can evaluate one concept in monadic testing. In the end, the collected results are compared to decide the winning concept.

Concept Test is used by a company to evaluate product concepts, ad campaigns, etc. The concepts are presented to your target market followed by a survey to collect feedback. As a result, you can collect insights on product acceptance, preference, etc.

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