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. Inputs from part (A), which detail a pilot conjoint study, are used to refine the design and data is collected from a large sample for one origin–destination pair and presented in the second part (B).

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 second part (B), the new design based on the pilot study described in Part (A) is presented along with data and the task is to estimate a choice model, interpret the results, and use simulations to assess demand in different scenarios. This case set is intended for use in a course on “Analytical Marketing” or ‘‘Marketing Research’’.