What Can MaxDiff Best-Worst Scaling Do For You?

MaxDiff, also known as Best-Worst Scaling, is an approach for measuring preference/importance for a list of items. Items could include messages, benefits, images, health risks, product names, brands, features, packaging options, and more! In a typical MaxDiff exercise, respondents are shown 3-5 items at a time from the full list of items and asked to indicate which is the best and which is worst, or most and least important, etc. Respondents see a dozen or so of these scenarios, with each scenario containing a different subset of items.