MÉTODOS PARA LA COMPRENSIÓN DEL CLIENTE ¿CUÁNDO MERECEN LA PENA?

Abstract

Because customer understanding, specially at early stages of new product development, has been acknowledged to be a determinant of new product success, researchers have developed different methods that can be used to enhance customer understanding. Although designers can choose among different methods for customer understanding, practitioners make little use of them. One of the reasons argued for this low usage rate is that designers are not familiar to these methods: they do not know about their advantages or disadvantages neither about the ideal conditions for application. Based on the work of van Kleef, van Trijp and Luning (2005), the following methods for customer understanding were identified and analyzed: (1) laddering, (2) free elicitation, (3) Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), (4) Kelly repertory grid, (5) focus group and (6) category appraisal. A series of experiments were defined to empirically analyze these methods for customer understanding to the same design problem. The conclusions of the application in practice of the methods described in a controlled environment will help practitioners to understand in which situations and under which circumstances each method can best contribute to gaining customer knowledge as an input for product innovation. Keywords: customer understanding; fuzzy front end of innovation; methods