Methodical Data-Driven Integration Of Perceived Quality Into The Product Development Process

Abstract

Due to the strong technical and functional similarities of today’s consumer products, the emotional and sensory product characteristics become increasingly important in order to stand out from the competition. To meet the comprehensive customer requirements it is no longer sufficient to develop a product that only focusses on functional aspects – the common understanding of product quality – but one that corresponds to sensory perception as well.The objective of this research is to develop a data-driven methodology in order to make Perceived Quality systematically usable in the product development process. The aim is on the one hand to increase the product value for the customer and on the other hand to improve the development and innovation process. Thus, customer’s sensory perception of product quality is comprehensible and continuously integrated into the product development process.The increasing amount of customer-generated content regarding a product for example published in Social Media are an important source of information for companies. In addition, companies have access to a variety of data such as studies, internal audits, Lead User workshops, claims as well as complaints. These data sources can provide information about the perceived quality of products. Despite the fact that the industry has partly recognized the importance of Perceived Quality, methodical aspects of the implementation into the product development process have yet to be considered systematically.For the comprehensive acquisition of valuable data, various sources of information need to be taken into account. Due to the diversity of different sources, the challenge is to collect useful data and avoid the loss of information. The different sources and data have to be standardized and structured to enable data analytics. By means of clustering provided information can then be transformed in reliable customer requirements.