Pricing surveys: types and how to use them

At a glance

A price survey tells you what your market will pay before you set a price, launch a product, or raise your rates. Pricing your product or service correctly is essential to your business: the right pricing strategy shapes your revenue, your profit margins, and how your brand is perceived.

With 72% of consumers reporting reduced spending over the past three months, according to the SurveyMonkey Business Trends Report, most companies can no longer afford to guess. A pricing survey, sometimes called a price survey questionnaire, replaces the guesswork with direct feedback from the people who decide whether to buy.

A price survey is one of the most common market research use cases teams rely on before a launch or a price change. Keep reading to learn the four main pricing survey methods, how to pick the right one, and how to run your own price survey in four steps.

A pricing survey is a research method that asks your target market directly what they would pay for a product or service. It is how you find your price ceiling, your price floor, and the point in between where most people will still buy.

Every pricing survey method shares the same goal: find out how real potential customers value what you're selling. Pricing survey questions can ask about a single price point, a range of prices, or a full set of product features priced against each other.

The data you collect sets your pricing strategy. It also feeds your revenue and profit forecasts, so a flawed pricing survey questionnaire can throw off numbers well beyond the price tag itself.

Pricing is one of the hardest calls a business makes, and a pricing survey is the fastest way to base that call on evidence instead of a hunch. Here is what a price survey gets you:

You do not need a research background to run a solid pricing survey. Here is the short version.

Teams running the Price Optimization solution in SurveyMonkey LaunchPad often see their first responses within one hour of launching a study, and most studies wrap up within 24 to 48 hours, even for niche or global audiences.

There are four commonly used pricing survey methods: willingness to pay, the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, Gabor-Granger, and conjoint analysis. Each one answers a slightly different question, so many teams end up using more than one.

Also called WTP, willingness to pay surveys reveal the highest price point customers will pay for your product or service. The economy, seasonal trends, location, product differentiation, and competitive value all shape willingness to pay. The other three methods on this list are all, in effect, different ways of measuring it.

A simple willingness to pay survey presents product details, then asks respondents what they would pay with either an open-ended question or a set of closed-ended price points. Use open-ended questions when your audience already knows the product type and roughly what it costs.

Use closed-ended questions when you have a unique product and a target price in mind, and place that target near the middle of the range you offer.

Example open-ended question: How much would you be willing to pay for this product?

Example closed-ended question: What would you be willing to pay for this product?

Dutch economist Peter Van Westendorp developed the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter in 1976. Companies use it when they are unsure of the right price range for a product, since it identifies the price points that matter most, psychologically, to buyers.

The survey questions in the Van Westendorp method capture your target customers’ price sensitivity, purchasing power, thought process regarding purchase decisions, and, most importantly, how much they are willing to pay for your product. The one thing Van Westendorp does not take into account is your competitors’ pricing.

The four pricing survey questions asked in the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter are:

Once collected, you’ll need to take your survey response data and plot it on a price sensitivity map. On the map, the x-axis is the price, and the y-axis is the percentage of respondents who chose that price. It’s the intersections of the graphed data that provide you with the information you need for pricing.

The point where the responses to questions one and two intersect is the point of marginal cheapness (PMC), and the intersection of the responses to questions two and four is the point of marginal expensiveness (PME). The PMC and PME represent the lowest and highest price points that your customers are willing to pay. This is known as the “range of acceptable pricing.”

You can use that range to set your launch price, sale prices, and price increases during the product life cycle.

British economists Andre Gabor and Clive Granger developed the Gabor-Granger method in the 1960s.

It pinpoints the best price for your product by measuring price elasticity: how likely people are to buy at different price points, so you can plot demand and revenue curves and find the price that maximizes revenue. Like Van Westendorp, it does not factor in competitor pricing.

Example question: After reading all the information about our product, how likely are you to purchase it at $100?

If a respondent picks one of the bottom three answers, you can use skip logic to show the same question at a lower price, and repeat until you find the price they would accept.

If they pick one of the top two answers, count them toward a top-2-box score: add the percentage who chose "extremely likely" to the percentage who chose "very likely," and that combined share is the portion of your market likely to buy at that price.

The fourth method, conjoint analysis, also called trade-off analysis, is a statistical technique used to understand what value customers place on different product features, including price. It works the way real shopping does: respondents compare full sets of competing products and choose between them, which reveals which price and which features have the most pull on the purchase decision.

A conjoint analysis survey shows respondents combinations of product attributes, one of which is price, and asks them to choose between the sets, or to rank the attributes by importance.

Pro tip: Limit how many combinations you show any one respondent. Too many, and survey fatigue sets in, along with confusing results.

Once you've picked a methodology, decide who takes the survey. If you haven't already defined your target market and segments, that's worth doing first through broader market research. 

Customer segmentation helps you define the groups within your target market, which you can then apply to price segmentation, where price varies by willingness to pay.

Identify who your participants need to be before you field anything. If your product serves senior citizens, survey people 65 and older. If your product serves a broader group, make sure your sample reflects your entire target market, not just the easiest segment to reach.

SurveyMonkey Audience connects you with the right people for a pricing survey, using demographics, finances, living situation, and more than 50 other attributes. Or, if you want a head start on the questions themselves, our price testing survey template gives you a six-question starting point you can customize.

The right price increases your revenue and your profit. Pick the method above that matches your situation, or simplify the process with the Price Optimization solution from SurveyMonkey LaunchPad, which builds your Van Westendorp study for you and turns responses into a price sensitivity meter automatically, without a subscription.

Need broader support? SurveyMonkey also offers market research solutions covering brand tracking, product innovation, and more.