MaxDiff: Prioritisation with Precision in a Noisy World

In an era of information overload and hyper-choice, one of the most critical business challenges is understanding what truly matters to your audience. Whether you're optimising product features, refining a service proposition, or shaping communication strategies, you need to go beyond general preferences and uncover clear priorities. That’s where MaxDiff (Maximum Difference Scaling) offers exceptional value. 

Moving Beyond Traditional Ranking Questions 

Conventional surveys often ask respondents to rate or rank features, benefits, or ideas. However, these formats are prone to response biases, such as “rating inflation”, where everything ends up being rated as important. The result is ambiguous data that offers little direction. 

MaxDiff solves this by enforcing discriminative choice. Respondents are shown small sets of items and asked to choose the most and least preferred options. This process is repeated across different sets, and the underlying analytics derive a robust prioritisation model. 

Why MaxDiff Works So Effectively 

The strength of MaxDiff lies in its simplicity for the respondent and its sophistication behind the scenes. From just a few choices per respondent, the technique applies statistical modeling (often hierarchical Bayesian estimation or multinomial logit models) to produce interval-level, ratio-scaled scores for each item. 

This means you don’t just know what people like most, you also know by how much. You don’t just get a rank; you get a clear, data-backed hierarchy of preferences with measurable distances between items. 

Applications span a wide range of use cases: 

Product Development: Identify must-have features versus “nice to haves” 

Messaging Strategy: Highlight benefits with the greatest persuasive power 

Innovation Pipelines: Prioritise ideas based on potential resonance 

Priorities, Not Guesses 

MaxDiff is not about asking what people think is important, instead it’s about observing what they’re willing to prioritise when forced to make a choice. This gives researchers and decision-makers an edge: insight anchored in real-world trade-offs. 

Whether you're launching a new service, optimising a product line, or refining your value proposition, MaxDiff gives you confidence in what should rise to the top. It separates the critical few from the trivial many. 

MaxDiff with OnePoll 

At OnePoll, we use MaxDiff to bring focus to complexity. By helping clients distill large volumes of options into a strategic order of importance, we equip them to act with clarity, not conjecture. Our MaxDiff research delivers insights that are not only statistically sound but strategically transformative. 

MaxDiff: Because when everything is important, nothing is. We help you find what truly matters.