Integration of marketing research techniques into house of quality and product family design

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a well-known technique used for designing products and services to reflect customer needs. The first phase of QFD, usually called house of quality (HOQ), is of fundamental and strategic importance in the QFD process. Although the traditional HOQ has been successfully used for several decades, it has often been faced with a number of problems in real application cases. This paper will discuss three main problems: (1) the conceptual gap between customers and designers, (2) the existence of the possible customer segments, and (3) the need for trade-off among different levels of customer needs, which tend to come up in the early stage of the HOQ process. In order to overcome these problems, a new methodology is proposed based on the integration of two marketing research techniques: conjoint analysis and two-stage cluster analysis. Conjoint analysis is used to bridge conceptual gap and to balance different levels of customer needs. A two-stage clustering method is employed to cluster customers into different segments based on the main benefits derived from the conjoint study, and to foster the development of a product family. This paper also introduces three indices, namely, the commonality percentage, the cost reduction, and the satisfaction percentage to analyze the results of developing a generic product in comparison with a product family. A case study on office chair is put forward to illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology.