A Concept Evaluation Method for Strategic Product Design with Concurrent Consideration of Future Customer Requirements

Abstract

Customer-driven product design is initiated by an important step, acquisition of customer requirements, which will characterize the concept of a product. In rapidly changing market places, however, the customer requirements used for decision making in a product design may be easily outdated at the time point of product introduction to a market. In this article, a method is introduced for evaluating degree of customer satisfaction for a product concept in a future marketplace by extending revealed value analysis to the future. This method includes four main steps: (i) converting sales data to customer revealed value (CRV); (ii) developing a revealed value model (RVM) for mapping between product attributes and the CRVs; (iii) forecasting a dynamic RVM based on historical RVM over past years; and (iv) designing a product or evaluating concepts of a new product based on the forecasted dynamic RVM. In the case study, we demonstrate the usefulness of this method for the strategic conceptual design of passenger cars based on the sales data of the US automobile market.