An analysis of consumer preferences and segmentation for mobile phone service providers in India: a multivariate approach

Consumer preferences and information on product choice behaviour can be of significant value in development processes of services. Mobile phone service providers (MSPs) always look for gaining valuable insight into consumer preferences which help them in designing their service packages accordingly. This paper analyses the applicability of conjoint analysis, a classical technique to identify consumer preferences in multi-attribute decision making, to the design of mobile phone service packages and determination of the relative importance of attributes in consumer choice processes. Further, with the introduction of mobile number portability (MNP), there is an urgency to build user profiles and develop a market plan to retain and target new customers. Thus, the study also identifies segments based on their preference pattern and choices through hierarchical cluster analysis which extracts salient and homogeneous consumer segments from the conjoint analysis output.