How a Pet-Care Retailer Used MaxDiff to Optimize Its Cat Food Assortment

The retailer wanted to determine which cat food formats deserved priority across its assortment, shelf space, digital merchandising, and promotions. Eleven formats were tested, including dry food, wet food, gourmet food,, different flavors.

MaxDiff, or best-worst scaling, was appropriate because it forced respondents to choose the most and least appealing options within each task. This revealed relative preference more clearly than a standard rating question.

Compeers guided the user through setup before running the analysis. The workflow confirmed the study design, automatically detected the task-and-attribute structure, displayed the associated dataset columns for review, and asked the user to map the values representing Best, Worst, and shown but not chosen.

This validation reduced the risk of analyzing incorrectly defined tasks or response codes. After approval, Compeers generated preference shares, utilities, credible intervals, attribute rankings, demographic comparisons, and a preference-based segmentation.

Wet food was the clear category leader. dry food captured 17.5% preference share, followed by soft chewable foods at 15.9% and hard gourmet foods at 12.1%. Other formats and pastes each received less than 4%, indicating limited broad-market appeal.

The research also identified two shopper segments. Traditional Format Seekers represented 46.8% and favored familiar, straightforward formats. Food-Driven Enthusiasts represented 53.2% and preferred formats that felt enjoyable and rewarding for the cat.

The retailer could build its core assortment around soft treats, allocate growth space to dry food and chewables, and tailor merchandising by shopper segment. Less-preferred formats could be reserved for targeted use cases.

The wider study also supported a tiered price architecture: 48.2% of owners were willing to spend $25 to $34 monthly, while 55.4% were open to $35 or more. This provided a basis for mainstream and premium assortment tiers, targeted education, sampling, and more disciplined product-selection decisions.

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