Sujit Acharya

Sujit Acharya is a 35 year old student from Bhubaneswar, India. After finishing his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and M.Sc in Physics (Major: Statistical Mechanics) at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) in 2005, he started working for Credit-Suisse in Zurich, Switzerland. Presently, he works for a consulting firm in Zurich, Switzerland in the field of Wealth Management, developing strategy for the Marketing activities. 

In 2015, he started studying again at ETH-Zurich (www.mas-mtec.ethz.ch), pursuing Masters in Advanced Studies in Management, Technology and Economics with specialization in Marketing Science and Strategy with Consumer Behavior as his focus in his thesis.

Currently, he is writing his Master Thesis in the chair of Strategic Management and Innovation (http://www.smi.ethz.ch) under Prof. Dr. Georg Von Krogh at ETH-Zurich and a Product company, which is strategizing towards servitization. 

Strategizing towards services is extremely challenging owing to the very nature of the services -“intangibility”, as is highlighted in numerous research papers in this field. However, none of the research papers on Servitization, even though anecdotal in nature, provide any concrete steps towards applying a tool or methodology that could be useful in coming up with appropriate Integrated Product-Service Design. Understanding consumer preferences towards a completely new service offered by Product companies remains the key challenge towards coming up with the appropriate services in the light of designing the appropriate service organization.  

Inspired by Telecom industry, Sujit intends to apply Choice Based Conjoint studies to understand the preferences of consumers in Switzerland w.r.t the New Service offered by this product company, as the new service is software based and Telecom Industry provides an appropriate setting owing to the number of research papers published on application of Conjoint Studies in this industry. 

For coming up with the attributes and levels of the new service to be tested in the market, he used Means-End Theory to understand the cognitive positioning of this service in the minds of the consumers though laddering technique. It is well founded in Consumer Psychology that if a consumer associates an attribute of a product/service with the consequences he/she would like to have with its usage and ultimately, if this consequence(s) reinforces his/her personal values, then the product/service clearly finds a cognitive positioning in his value-map. These attributes ultimately form the base for the list of attributes and levels to be experimented with the conjoint design.

He intends to use Alternative Specific Design of CBC to elicit the preferences through a survey and then plan to estimate the market profitability of specific combination of service packages. In the end, his thesis would come up with the optimal service package which will help the product company to enter into the market. The setting is in B2B marketing.