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Evaluation of common pricing survey methods

April 11, 2026

Sam Green

If you're here, you've probably already started thinking about conducting a pricing and packaging survey. Your first step should always be to get clear about what exactly you're trying to get out of it. What are the questions you're trying to answer? What are you going to do with the results? What are your knowns and unknowns? These are the types of questions that will help narrow down the methodology you should use.

Some of the most common specialized methods used in pricing and packaging surveys include:

Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter
Gabor-Granger Method
Max-Diff (a.k.a. Maximum Difference Scaling, or Best-Worst Scaling)
Conjoint Analysis (and its many sub-types)

There are use cases that call for each of these methods, and which you choose will depend on the questions you're trying to answer and, frankly, your budget. Van Westendorp and Gabor-Granger surveys are far simpler and can be done with smaller sample sizes compared to Max-Diff and Conjoint Analysis. However, Conjoint Analysis is often considered the gold standard for quantitative pricing and packaging surveys — and when done right, the results are absolutely worth the investment.

Below is a comparison of each method across key dimensions.

Customer & Prospect Surveys — Common approaches and how to use them

	Van Westendorp	Gabor-Granger	Max-Diff	Conjoint
Description	Present a product, feature, or package and ask respondents to fill in price points they think would be too cheap / a bargain / getting expensive / too expensive	Present a product, feature, or package and ask respondents if they would consider a purchase at a given, pre-established price point	Present a set of features and ask respondents to identify which is the most and least important	Present a series of products or packages with different feature sets and price points and ask customers to identify which they would purchase
Use Cases	Establish a price point for a new product or package Compare willingness to pay between products Identify incremental value of a new feature Evaluate price elasticity	Establish a price point if you already have a range identified Evaluate a potential price change on an existing product Evaluate price elasticity	Determine which features are most valuable to customers Identify prospective new features to prioritize Assist in packaging decisions	Optimize pricing and packaging across good/better/best tiers Assign a value to a given feature within a broader set Assist in packaging decisions
Pros	Simple to implement and analyze Works with small sample sizes Allows any range of price points	Simple to implement and analyze Works with small sample sizes Less room for respondent bias Easily interpreted results Pairs well with other pricing methods	Easily interpreted results Pairs well with other pricing methods to get at the "why" of WTP	Detailed results about both price points and feature importance Can test a lot of information at once
Cons	Fairly subjective — respondents may be biased toward lowball answers High variation can make results difficult to interpret if respondents aren't segmented Traditional interpretation fairly meaningless	Need to have an existing idea of the right price range Choosing the wrong price points can bias results Requires repeated questions and minimum sample size for valid results	Does not provide pricing information or packaging optimization per se	Complex to implement and analyze — generally requires specialized software Requires substantial sample size for meaningful results Requires clear and agreed-upon levels for each attribute Need to have an existing idea of the right price range

Need help choosing the right methodology?

Greengage Advisors has designed, executed, and analyzed pricing surveys across all of these methods. We can help you figure out the right approach for your project — and guide you from survey design through to actionable recommendations.

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