Facilitating customer involvement into the decision-making process of concept generation and concept evaluation for new product development

Abstract

Facilitating customer involvement into the decision-making process of concept generation and concept evaluation plays a vital role to achieve successful new product development. In particular, customer-preference based market segmentation could offer numerous business synergies, such as: (1) learning which product attributes are most critical to distinct segments, (2) identifying niche segments to assist an enterprise in generating design concepts, (3) helping product managers better predict customers\' desires to effectively implement promotion plans for future market opportunities. In this study, a novel framework which integrates conjoint analysis with Kano model is proposed to address the aforementioned issues. By virtue of conjoint analysis, customer preference is initially formulated through their perceived importance degrees of critical attributes and the entire market is segmented accordingly. Thereafter, with respect to distinct segments, conjoint analysis is employed again to extract customer utilities of critical attributes while Kano model is used to elicit customer delight/disgust of optional attributes, respectively. Finally, a real case study on generating and evaluating various design alternatives of a smart-phone is demonstrated to validate our proposed approach.