The original Van Westendorp paper measured something narrower than most surveys today

The Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter is one of the most widely used pricing research tools in existence — four questions (too cheap, cheap, expensive, too expensive) plotted against each other to estimate an "acceptable price range" and an optimal price point. Peter van Westendorp introduced the method at the 1976 ESOMAR Congress, and it has been a staple of product and pricing research ever since, largely because it's cheap to field and easy to explain to a non-technical stakeholder.

What often gets lost is how narrow the original technique's claims were. Van Westendorp's method estimates a range of acceptable prices based on stated intent, not actual purchase behavior, and it says nothing about volume or revenue at any given price point — only about perceived fairness and value. It also assumes respondents can meaningfully answer questions about a product they may never have purchased before, which works reasonably well for familiar categories and much less well for genuinely novel products.

The method has no built-in way to account for competitive pricing context, income effects, or brand positioning, and it treats every respondent's opinion as equally informative regardless of whether they're a realistic buyer. Later refinements, notably Newton, Miller and Smith's NMS extension, attempted to convert the Van Westendorp curves into actual demand and revenue estimates, but that requires additional purchase-likelihood questions the original method doesn't ask.

None of this makes Van Westendorp a bad tool — it remains one of the fastest, cheapest ways to get a defensible price range, particularly early in product development. The practical warning is not to over-interpret the output: it tells you a plausible range and a rough psychological midpoint, not a revenue-optimal price, and it works best paired with a real conjoint or elasticity test before a final pricing decision, not as a replacement for one.