The Construction of Verbal Models

Abstract

This appendix will present a concrete and detailed example of the construction of verbal models through the application of the methodology presented in Chapter X. In particular, we illustrate a case study from our own research carried out in a large Italian automotive company and related to the analysis of the voice of customer (VOC) in the development of new products. In current approaches to new product development, the VOC analysis is a fundamental step in the early design phases and the main critical aspects concern the translation of customers’ wishes and requests into functional and technical specifications for concept development. Traditional models for VOC analysis usually neglect the importance of collecting qualitative information provided by customers and do not consider the way such information is processed by customers. Our hypothesis is that customers satisfaction has to be analyzed with a cognitive approach, according to the steps of the methodological approach presented in Chapter X: Eliciting/mapping individual customer’s explanation linking the satisfaction level to product’s characteristics and constructing verbal models in order to identify product’s attributes that are more influential on customer’s satisfaction.