Abstract
The success of a New Product Development (NPD) process strongly depends on the deep comprehension of market needs and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been commonly used to find weights for customers' preferences. AHP best practices suggest that low-consistency respondents should be considered untrustworthy; however, in some NPD cases – such as the one presented here – this stake can be extremely big. This paper deals with the usage of AHP methodology to define the weights of customer needs connected to the NPD process of a typical impulse buying good, a snack. The aim of the paper is to analyse in a critical way the opportunity to exclude or include non-consistent respondents in market analysis, addressing the following question: should a non-consistent potential customer be excluded from the analysis due to his inconsistency or should he be included because, after all, he is still a potential consumer? The chosen methodological approach focuses on evaluating the compatibility of weight vectors among different subsets of respondents, filtered according to their consistency level. Results surprisingly show that weights do not significantly change when non-consistent respondents are excluded.
Highlights
More than 89% of manufacturing companies believe that launching new products on the market is the principal driver of future growth [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Results of the analysis The chosen methodological approach focused on evaluating the Compatibility Index (Comp) of the weight vectors among different subsets of each respondent www.intechopen.com
2) Compatibility Indexes have been computed for pairs of weight vectors
Summary
More than 89% of manufacturing companies believe that launching new products on the market is the principal driver of future growth [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. Innovation can be divided into three main processes: project planning, new product development (NPD) and commercialization. The NPD process is one of the most complex within an organization, it embraces the sequence of activities that a company performs to conceive, design and sell a product. This process usually consists of the following steps: identification of customer needs, definition of product specifications, concept generation, concept selection, concept testing, setting of final specifications, project planning, economic analysis, benchmarking of competitor’s products, modelling and prototyping. Success for companies proposing new products on the market depends on the deep comprehension of customer needs, preferences and tastes. Anticipating the changes required in existing products www.intechopen.com
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