Conjoint: Adding New Products to Simulator
Tip
If your in going objective is to explore new-to-the-market products, be sure to leave a few empty columns to the left of the base case. It's a little easier to access the new products/columns where they are at the beginning/left.
How many products can you have in the simulator?
You can have as many as you want/need.
There is a cost, however, to having a lot. There is a point beyond 20 or so that you'll see the server response time starts to slow down. Recommendation: keep it to the 20 (or less) top products that represent your category.
Also the more products you have the more things there are to keep track of.
Starting configuration
We usually call the starting configuration that represents the current market the base case. Each product must have exactly one level of each attribute. New products are no exception. You can start them with the first level of each attribute or some other random config, but you need to specify something.
Don't forget Awareness and Distribution assumptions. Typically there is a well defined value for each of the base case products, but the new products Awareness and Distribution are not yet defined. You'll need to make an assumption. Not making an assumption is the same as assuming 100% - which is usually not too realistic for new products.
Brand balance
The products in the simulator should reasonably reflect the marketplace as much as possible. That includes getting the balance of brands roughly correct. A candy bar scenario with 5 butterfingers and 1 each of all others would not be a "fair" balancing act. You should expect that scenario to over estimate the market for butterfingers to some degree.
