Mind Genomics (Conjoint Analysis): The new concept research in the analysis of consumer behaviour and choice

Concepts are critical for the development and marketing of products and services. Market research practitioners and their corporate clients are well aware of the need to create winning concepts. To that end, a very large practice has emerged in the business world designed to understand the current competitive environment, identify opportunities, and convert these opportunities into concepts. Look at any prospectus by a market research company and there immediately emerges a self-proclaimed expertise on concept research. In actuality, however, the scientific underpinnings of concept research are quite weak. There is a dearth of both practical and scientific information about how to create and evaluate concepts. Although practitioners provide services for evaluation and optimization, the publications offered by the scientific community and the academic business researchers do not go into depth about how to create and measure concepts, leaving corporations and their developers/researchers in the lurch. The paper introduces the last concept technical upgrade, Mind Genomics, i.e., at its very simplest level, is the study of mixtures, the study of everyday stimuli, to understand the rules of choice, to discover what is important to a person and what is not. MG determines which aspects of the topic drive interest, or not; how people differ in the way they respond to these aspects of the topic; and how these differences cluster to form segments, called mind-sets. An application of MG was carried out to evaluate consumer acceptance of insect protein.