A strategy for acquiring customer requirement patterns using laddering technique and ART2 neural network

With the increasing interest and emphasis on customer demands in new product development, customer requirements elicitation (CRE) and evaluation have secured a crucial position in the early stage of product conceptualization. As such, it is highly desired to have a systematic strategy for soliciting customer requirements effectively, and subsequently, analyzing customer orientations quantitatively. For this purpose, a customer-oriented approach has accordingly been proposed and investigated in this study. It concerns both breadth and depth perspectives of customer requirements acquisition as well as customer and marketing analysis. This prototype system comprises two interrelated components, namely, the CRE and the customer/marketing analysis (CMA) modules. The process starts from the voice of customers and ends with the identified opportunities from marketing analysis. In the prototype system, the laddering technique has been employed to enable CRE via the so-called customer attributes hierarchy (CAM). In addition, the adaptive resonance theory, particularly ART2, neural network has been applied as a toolkit for further customer and marketing analysis. A case study on wood golf club design is used to demonstrate and validate this approach. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.