Abstract

In India, air travel in the early twentieth century is mostly between major cities and has historically been driven by businesses. However, a set of relatively unused airfields exist in or near smaller cities, presenting a potential opportunity for generating air travel demand in these locations. This would require a thorough understanding of existing travel options and the design of an air travel offering that can successfully compete with these options. The three-part case describes a methodology to arrive at the appropriate new air travel offering and an assessment of the extent of potential demand in this context. In the first part (A), competing travel modes are examined and the attributes that are relevant to the design of a new air travel offering are identified. A choice-based conjoint experiment is designed and pilot data is obtained and analyzed.

Learning Objective

The case provides a setting to engage in an end-to-end exercise of developing an attractive new product that is capable of generating primary demand and assessment of potential demand for such an offering in the aggregate market and segments within the market. This task requires an understanding of the conjoint methodology, with a specific focus on choice-based conjoint, and its use in the new product development process. In the first part of the case (A), the problem description, development of the initial conjoint design, and analysis of pilot data is described. The task at this point is to refine the design for final data collection. This case set is intended for use in a course on “Analytical Marketing” or ‘‘Marketing Research’’.