In recent years, many U.S. and Japanese firms have adopted Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is a total-quality-management process in which the “voice of the customer” is deployed throughout the R&D, engineering, and manufacturing stages of product development. For example, in the first “house” of QFD, customer needs are linked to design attributes thus encouraging the joint consideration of marketing issues and engineering issues. This paper focuses on the “Voice-of-the-Customer” component of QFD, that is, the tasks of identifying customer needs, structuring customer needs, and providing priorities for customer needs. In the stage, we address the questions of (1) how many customers need be interviewed, (2) how many analysts need to read the transcripts, (3) how many customer needs do we miss, and (4) are focus groups or one-on-one interviews superior? In the stage the customer needs are arrayed into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary needs. We compare group consensus (affinity) charts, a technique which accounts for most industry applications, with a technique based on customer-sort data. In the stage which we present new data in which product concepts were created by product-development experts such that each concept stressed the fulfillment of one primary customer need. Customer interest in and preference for these concepts are compared to measured and estimated importances. We also address the question of whether frequency of mention can be used as a surrogate for importance. Finally, we examine the stated goal of QFD, . Our data demonstrate a self-selection bias in satisfaction measures that are used commonly for QFD and for corporate incentive programs. We close with a brief application to illustrate how a product-development team used the voice of the customer to create a successful new product.new product research, product policy, measurement

The trend toward leaner, flatter organizations enhances the need for communication and cooperation between the marketing and the R&D functions. This paper reviews evidence of the need for integrative communication and cooperation, research on the barriers to integration, and extant models to study integration. We summarize this research and these models with a causal map to organize research on integration at the new-product project-level. Within this framework we review research on the methods that managers can (and are) using to achieve functional integration between marketing and R&D. These actions include relocation and physical facilities design, personnel movement, informal social systems, organizational structures, incentives and rewards, and formal integrative management processes. For each action we summarize evidence to date and propose researchable hypotheses.To succeed in today's marketplace, most corporations must engender cooperation between the marketing and R&D (Research and Development) functions.It was not always so. In earlier eras expertise could be centralized in a single person who knew (or developed) the product technology, production process, and means to market goods to others. For example, a blacksmith knew where to get raw materials, how to maintain the forge fire, and how to shape metal. Customers sought out the blacksmith and explained their needs. He asked the questions required to understand their needs and made the product, developing new features and production techniques to meet any special conditions as he went along. If he did these tasks well, he lived well. If he failed at any of these tasks, he starved. The marketing and R&D functions were integrated in the activities of the blacksmith. Market feedback was quick, obvious, and persuasive.Even today in entrepreneurial firms, the producer-inventor frequently combines the knowledge of what is needed with how to develop it. But as the firm grows, the marketing and R&D functions become specialized. Scientists are hired to maintain and develop technology; marketing specialists are hired to sell the product, talk to customers, and communicate product benefits. Over time these groups grow apart, each expert at their own function, but less aware of the other's contribution. As integration and communication between these critical functions decreases, their ability to combine skills to develop and produce successful products decreases. The firm suffers.Marketing and R&D both provide input to many tasks. Some are core tasks upon which the success of the enterprise rests. For example, marketing and R&D share responsibilities for setting new-product goals, identifying opportunities for the next generation of product improvement, resolving engineering-design and customer-need tradeoffs, and understanding customer needs. These responsibilities require cooperation throughout the entire task and the combined expertise of both functional groups. Other tasks are dominated by one or the other group. For example, marketing often has domin...

I nnovation is one of the most important issues in business research today. It has been studied in many independent research traditions. Our understanding and study of innovation can benefit from an integrative review of these research traditions. In so doing, we identify 16 topics relevant to marketing science, which we classify under five research fields: • Consumer response to innovation, including attempts to measure consumer innovativeness, models of new product growth, and recent ideas on network externalities; • Organizations and innovation, which are increasingly important as product development becomes more complex and tools more effective but demanding; • Market entry strategies, which includes recent research on technology revolution, extensive marketing science research on strategies for entry, and issues of portfolio management; • Prescriptive techniques for product development processes, which have been transformed through global pressures, increasingly accurate customer input, Web-based communication for dispersed and global product design, and new tools for dealing with complexity over time and across product lines; • Defending against market entry and capturing the rewards of innovating, which includes extensive marketing science research on strategies of defense, managing through metrics, and rewards to entrants. For each topic, we summarize key concepts and highlight research challenges. For prescriptive research topics, we also review current thinking and applications. For descriptive topics, we review key findings.

The trend toward leaner, flatter organizations enhances the need for communication and cooperation between the marketing and the R&D functions. This paper reviews evidence of the need for integrative communication and cooperation, research on the barriers to integration, and extant models to study integration. We summarize this research and these models with a causal map to organize research on integration at the new-product project-level. Within this framework we review research on the methods that managers can (and are) using to achieve functional integration between marketing and R&D. These actions include relocation and physical facilities design, personnel movement, informal social systems, organizational structures, incentives and rewards, and formal integrative management processes. For each action we summarize evidence to date and propose researchable hypotheses.To succeed in today's marketplace, most corporations must engender cooperation between the marketing and R&D (Research and Development) functions.It was not always so. In earlier eras expertise could be centralized in a single person who knew (or developed) the product technology, production process, and means to market goods to others. For example, a blacksmith knew where to get raw materials, how to maintain the forge fire, and how to shape metal. Customers sought out the blacksmith and explained their needs. He asked the questions required to understand their needs and made the product, developing new features and production techniques to meet any special conditions as he went along. If he did these tasks well, he lived well. If he failed at any of these tasks, he starved. The marketing and R&D functions were integrated in the activities of the blacksmith. Market feedback was quick, obvious, and persuasive.Even today in entrepreneurial firms, the producer-inventor frequently combines the knowledge of what is needed with how to develop it. But as the firm grows, the marketing and R&D functions become specialized. Scientists are hired to maintain and develop technology; marketing specialists are hired to sell the product, talk to customers, and communicate product benefits. Over time these groups grow apart, each expert at their own function, but less aware of the other's contribution. As integration and communication between these critical functions decreases, their ability to combine skills to develop and produce successful products decreases. The firm suffers.Marketing and R&D both provide input to many tasks. Some are core tasks upon which the success of the enterprise rests. For example, marketing and R&D share responsibilities for setting new-product goals, identifying opportunities for the next generation of product improvement, resolving engineering-design and customer-need tradeoffs, and understanding customer needs. These responsibilities require cooperation throughout the entire task and the combined expertise of both functional groups. Other tasks are dominated by one or the other group. For example, marketing often has domin...

If utility (net of price) varies by consumption occasion, the consideration set of a rational consumer will represent trade-offs between decision costs and the incremental benefits of choosing from a larger set of brands. If evaluating a brand decreases biases and uncertainty in perceived utility, the decision to evaluate a brand for inclusion in a consideration set is different from the decision to consider an evaluated brand. The decision to consume is, in turn, different from the decision to consider. This article provides analytical expressions for these decision criteria and presents four aggregate implications of the model: (1 ) distributions of consideration set sizes, (2) order-of-entry penalties, (3) dynamic advertising response, and (4) competitive promotion intensity.

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Scientific evidence suggests that firms are more successful at new product development if there is greater communication among marketing, engineering, and manufacturing. This paper examines communication patterns for two matched product development teams (same manufacturer, same product development stage, similar functions and number of parts, reporting to the same divisional upper manager). The key difference between the groups is that one team used a traditional phase review process and the other used Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a product development process adopted widely at over 100 United States and Japanese firms including such large organizations as General Motors, Ford, IBM, and Procter & Gamble. The comparison is of scientific and managerial interest because QFD is often adopted to enhance crossfunctional communication. To our knowledge, this is the first head-to-head comparison of traditional U.S. product development processes with QFD.We report data collected on communication levels within functions, between functions, within the teams, within the OEM group, between the OEM and supplier groups, and between the teams and external information sources. Our data suggests that QFD enhances communication levels within the core team (marketing, engineering, manufacturing). QFD changes communication patterns from "up-over-down" flows through management to more horizontal "across" routes where core team members communicate directly with one another. The QFD team communicates more on product design, customer needs, and market information than does the phase review team. On the other hand, the QFD team communicates less on planning information and less with members of the firm external to the team. If this paucity of external communication means that the team has the information it needs for product development, and the QFD process has provided an effective means for moving the information through the team, it is a positive impact of QFD. If the result means that QFD induces team insularity, even when the team needs to reach out to external information sources, it is a cause for concern.

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