To practitioner and researcher alike, consumer values play an important role in understanding behavior in the marketplace. This paper presents a model linking perceived product attributes to values.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3203341

A means–end chain model based on consumer categorization processes.

In recent years, many U.S. and Japanese firms have adopted Quality Function Deployment QFD. QFD is a total-quality-management process in which the "voice of the customer" is deployed throughout the R&D, engineering, and manufacturing stages of product development. For example, in the first "house" of QFD, customer needs are linked to design attributes thus encouraging the joint consideration of marketing issues and engineering issues. This paper focuses on the "Voice-of-the-Customer" component of QFD, that is, the tasks of identifying customer needs, structuring customer needs, and providing priorities for customer needs.

In the identification stage, we address the questions of 1 how many customers need be interviewed, 2 how many analysts need to read the transcripts, 3 how many customer needs do we miss, and 4 are focus groups or one-on-one interviews superior? In the structuring stage the customer needs are arrayed into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary needs. We compare group consensus affinity charts, a technique which accounts for most industry applications, with a technique based on customer-sort data. In the stage which provides priorities we present new data in which product concepts were created by product-development experts such that each concept stressed the fulfillment of one primary customer need. Customer interest in and preference for these concepts are compared to measured and estimated importances. We also address the question of whether frequency of mention can be used as a surrogate for importance. Finally, we examine the stated goal of QFD, customer satisfaction. Our data demonstrate a self-selection bias in satisfaction measures that are used commonly for QFD and for corporate incentive programs.

We close with a brief application to illustrate how a product-development team used the voice of the customer to create a successful new product.

https://www.mit.edu/~hauser/Papers/Gaskin_Griffin_Hauser_et_al%20VOC%20Encyclopedia%202011.pdf

The Voice of the Customer

The authors develop a new survey-based method for measuring and understanding a brand's equity in a product category and evaluating the equity of the brand's extension into a different but related ...

A Survey-Based Method for Measuring and Understanding Brand Equity and Its Extendibility

Examines the determinants that influence consumers’ intention to buy environmentally friendly products. Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour (TPB) provides the conceptual framework of the research and the appropriateness of the theory and is tested in two distinct market conditions (UK and Greece). Although the findings offer considerable support for the robustness of the TPB in explaining intention in both samples, there is some indication that the theory is more appropriate in well established markets that are characterised by clearly formulated behavioural patterns (i.e. the model fitting elements of the UK sample are superior to the corresponding ones obtained from the Greek sample). The results are consistent with previous research on moral behaviour.

Donald S. Tull

Papers

Research for Marketing Decisions

Research for marketing decisions

Marketing Research: Meaning, Measurement and Method

Marketing research : measurement & method

Research for Marketing Decisions.