Abstract
Many new products fail. Far too many! Products fail regularly in both the manufacturing and service sectors. By failure we mean that these new products fail to excite customers and fail to reach the sales and market share goals set by the companies that develop them. Research shows that the major reason that new products and services fail is that they are too similar to existing market offerings. New products which are hard to differentiate simply do not capture the customer’s imagination. However, the lack of differentiable features is a symptom. The cause of the problem is a poor understanding of customers’ needs. Companies need to take a radically different approach if they are to be successful at identifying customers’ real needs and this book is about innovative ways to conduct market research. Specifically, it addresses how to unveil what we will term customers’ hidden needs.
We don’t believe in doing market research for a new product unknown to the public.
Akio Morita, Sony1
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Recommended Reading
Squires, S. and Byrne, B. (eds.) (2002) Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in the Product Development Industry. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. [Excellent book on how insights from the social sciences have influenced product development. Less on the techniques themselves.]
Leonard-Barton, D. and Rayport, J. F., “Spark Innovation through Empathic Design,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 75, No. 6, November-December, 1997, pp. 102–113. [Good paper on how observing customers can identify needs for which product solutions can be brainstormed but gives little detail though on how to analyze the results.]
Goffin, K. and Mitchell, R. Innovation Management: Strategy and Implementation Using the Pentathlon Framework. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Academic Publishers, 2nd Edition 2010. [In this book we concentrate on the broader aspects of innovation management.]
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© 2010 Keith Goffin, Fred Lemke & Ursula Koners
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Goffin, K., Lemke, F., Koners, U. (2010). Introduction to Customers’ Hidden Needs. In: Identifying Hidden Needs. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294486_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294486_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30531-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29448-6
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