Willingness to pay is one of the most abused phrases in commercial research. Most of the work that is sold under that heading is not willingness to pay research at all. It is stated preference research, which is a different thing, and its results tend to collapse the moment a pricing committee tries to use them to set a real number.
Two definitions worth separating
Stated preference research asks a buyer what they would pay. The answers are usually optimistic in one direction or another depending on how the question was phrased and on whether the buyer thought the research was tied to a future commercial decision. Revealed willingness to pay is built from what the buyer actually paid, or agreed to pay, in a live purchase. The revealed answer almost always trails the stated answer by a meaningful gap.
How we build it
- Anchor on real transactions. Start with a sample of completed purchases and reconstruct the price path. The sample does not need to be huge. It needs to be clean.
- Interview the losers. The buyers who walked away from the purchase are usually more informative about the true ceiling than the buyers who signed. Interview both.
- Use a forced trade off, not a free text box. A forced trade off between a higher price with more capability and a lower price with less capability produces cleaner signal than any free text question.
- Build a price ladder in the client's own currency and at the client's own packaging tier. Abstract price ladders are almost always misread by respondents.
- Present the result as a band, not as a point. The point estimate will be wrong. The band can be defended.
What the firm will not say
The firm will not present a willingness to pay number as a single point estimate. The firm will not present a willingness to pay number that was built only from stated preference. The firm will not present a willingness to pay number without naming the segment, the package, and the currency the number applies to. A number without those three anchors is not a pricing input, it is a hope.