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

A geometric program (GP) is a type of mathematical optimization problem characterized by objective and constraint functions that have a special form. Recently developed solution methods can solve even large-scale GPs extremely efficiently and reliably; at the same time a number of practical problems, particularly in circuit design, have been found to be equivalent to (or well approximated by) GPs. Putting these two together, we get effective solutions for the practical problems. The basic approach in GP modeling is to attempt to express a practical problem, such as an engineering analysis or design problem, in GP format. In the best case, this formulation is exact; when this is not possible, we settle for an approximate formulation. This tutorial paper collects together in one place the basic background material needed to do GP modeling. We start with the basic definitions and facts, and some methods used to transform problems into GP format. We show how to recognize functions and problems compatible with GP, and how to approximate functions or data in a form compatible with GP (when this is possible). We give some simple and representative examples, and also describe some common extensions of GP, along with methods for solving (or approximately solving) them.

/pdf/a-tutorial-on-geometric-programming-47sdznbzxw.pdf

A tutorial on geometric programming

Attitude determinants in tourism destination choice

Understanding retail branding: conceptual insights and research priorities

Although the merits of maintaining a market orientation have been extensively discussed in the literature, studies examining the empirical link between market orientation and performance have shown mixed results. The authors explore the relative performance effects of various dimensions of market orientation using a longitudinal approach based on letters to shareholders in corporate annual reports. Furthermore, the authors examine the relative effects of alternative strategic orientations that reflect different managerial priorities for the firm. The authors also extend previous work by considering the mediating effects of organizational learning and innovativeness on the orientation-performance relationship. The results show that firms possessing higher levels of competitor orientation, national brand focus, and selling orientation exhibit superior performance.

Market Orientation and Alternative Strategic Orientations: A Longitudinal Assessment of Performance Implications

In this article, the authors study the role of a store brand in building store loyalty through a game theoretic analysis. In a market in which a segment of consumers is sensitive to product quality and consumers’ brand choice in low-involvement packaged goods categories is characterized by inertia, the authors show that quality store brands can be an instrument for retailers to generate store differentiation, store loyalty, and store profitability, even when the store brand does not have a margin advantage over the national brand. In addition, this loyalty argument does not apply for the “cheap and nasty” private label strategy. Such a private label policy, on the contrary, reinforces rather than reduces price competition among stores. Indeed, the quality of the store brand must be above a threshold level to create this opportunity. It also follows that quality store brands, when carried by competing retailers, can be an implicit coordination mechanism that enables all the retailers to become mor...

Building Store Loyalty Through Store Brands

The allocation of scarce shelf space among competing products is a central problem in retailing. Space allocation affects store profitability through both the demand function, where both main and cross space elasticities have to be considered, and through the cost function procurement, carrying and out-of-stock costs. A model is developed which uniquely incorporates both effects. A case study is used to estimate the parameters and the problem is solved within a geometrical programming framework. An extensive comparison with alternative procedures suggests this general model leads to significantly different allocation rules and superior profit performance.

A Model for Optimizing Retail Space Allocations

REACHING THE LIMITS OF MARKETING ORIENTATION: The Evolution of Marketing Orientation Creating Sustainable Advantages in Consumer Markets Brand Proliferation Dealing with Hypersegmentation THE RISING RETAILER: Retail Evolution Retailers and the Marketing Concept Creating a Sustainable Retail DA MATRIX MARKETING: The Battle for Mindspace The Battle for Shelfspace Trade Marketing The New Order and its Challenges.

Store Wars: The Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace

The paper gives an overview and evaluates the theoretical traditions underlying choice models that are used in marketing. In particular, the emphasis of this essay is on the underlying assumptions, limitations and empirical demands of these choice models. Four fundamental choice models are used as a basis to analyze this complex field; the neoclassical economic theory as extended by Lancaster, the Risk-Preference Theory of Choices under uncertainty, the Strict Utility Theory and the Random Utility Theory. These four choice models and their extensions are compared and contrasted along the three critical steps in the model building process: theory generation, parameterization and estimation.

Formal Choice Models in Marketing

Surprisingly little significant research has been done on why companies switch their advertising agencies. The study matches the views of a large sample of companies which switched with those of th...

Marcel Corstjens

Papers

Building Store Loyalty Through Store Brands

A Model for Optimizing Retail Space Allocations

Store Wars: The Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace

Formal Choice Models in Marketing

Signals of Vulnerability in Agency-Client Relations: