Product Design and Customer Expectations

The importance of creating a comprehensive strategy for new product development in your multinational company cannot be overstated. Research and development is costly and the ramifications of bad decision making in new product development can be disastrous to your bottom line.

In Q2, you will be designing a brand for each target segment that you and your team have selected using market research. Understanding customer preferences, which is at the heart of the market research will be key to creating products that will sell to your target markets. This week you will be completing of the Microsimulation of Product Design – The QFD technique, and learning about the 5 fitnesses in your seminar to help you gain additional knowledge about customer expectations.

For this Discussion, you will be:

Main Response

• Presenting a summary of the importance of QFD to both your product design process and your marketing strategy development. Use your readings/videos from this week plus at least 2 other scholarly sources.
• Selecting at least one product line from the simulation (Recreation, Mountain, Speed) and completing a QFD. You can use the model from the simulation, information from the readings, the YouTube video, or another source you uncover in your research.
• Adding to the QFD the Fitness to Latent Requirement-Fitness #4, and Fitness to Society #5A due to the fact that QFD looks at current needs,
• Providing detail on how you determined customer needs both for the QFD and for the fitness additions
• Seeking feedback from your peers on areas that you would like to see strengthened in your approach.
• As part of the initial response, provide the QFD work you completed. You may either paste this information into the Discussion area or create an attachment (i.e., word doc or PowerPoint).