Modeling consumer insight strategy in product development process : a decision and implementation framework for product managers

Abstract

Companies today must constantly innovate to delight consumers and stay ahead of the competition. One way to deliver these is through new product launches. Despite significant investments, product failure rate in consumer products industry is high. Studies attribute failures to lack of quality and lack of integration of consumer insight in the Product Development Process. This thesis is an attempt for improvement, adopting the lens of consumer insight as information in the Product Development Process, and proposes a method to evaluate options more strategically. This thesis first examines available literature on Product Development Processes and consumer insight methodologies. It then uses Design Structure Matrix to identify consumer insight involvement in Product Development Process, and identifies gaps between the theoretical model and industry practice. Thereafter, this thesis proposes a technique to compare the quality of different consumer research methods at a given point in the process. Using this information, this thesis builds a Quantitative model to simulate the propagation effect of individual consumer insights decision on quality of output information, using rate of market change as a secondary factor. Within the constraints of this model, it was found that consumer insight strategy decisions should not be done in an ad-hoc manner, since consumer research method selection at each point in the Product Development Process has direct and propagative effects on the quality of the outcome. To obtain good quality, the selection of a good method is critical; first, because it allows for flexibility of options in subsequent phases, and second, because it is more effective than rework, under Slow and Rapid rate of market change. This thesis proposes decision and implementation frameworks as a guide for Product Managers, who can combine the predicted outcome of consumer insight quality with project management iron triangle, to select the best consumer insight strategy. While this consumer insight systemic model is a step towards a model-based design of consumer insight strategy, future work is needed to validate the quantitative model and resulting decision framework.