Marketing research does promote product and service innovation. The key is development of tools and techniques that direct managers to the âsourceâ of emerging customer needs and wants - the kinds of needs and wants that if fulfilled have the potential to excite customers promote brand preference and loyalty and keep a brand or firm a step ahead of its competitors. One such tool is attribute life cycle analysis. To date a method introduced by Kano and his colleagues has been the primary technique for attribute life cycle analysis. While the Kano method furnishes marketing managers with some important benefits it has some limitations that warrant development and application of alternative attribute life cycle analysis techniques. This paper describes two alternatives to the Kano method. It reports research indicating that these alternative techniques yield highly comparable results. Also presented is a recommended approach to and case illustration of how managers can use attribute life cycle analysis to identify opportunities for product and service innovation.
Expanding customer satisfaction measurement to the broader concept of Reference Group Management - to include customer satisfaction, employee orientation and image measurement, where appropriate - ensures that the correct decisions to improve customer satisfaction are taken, and that they can be implemented. Introducing the concept of Customer Retention enables the effect of customer satisfaction to be quantified in profit potential terms, providing a link between the 'soft' data of customer satisfaction measurement and the 'hard' data required for business management. The two together can have very substantial implications for the way a business manages the environment in which it operates, and consequently for the way it manages itself.
Market Research and Strategic Planning have a common task: To support management in the never-ending challenge to shape the future of companies and organisations. Neither market research nor strategic planning have the knowledge or the instruments to fulfil this task without the complementary support of each other. Still, there is no intensive cooperation or communication between both professions up to the present day. Market researchers in companies have been living in their own world with little contact to strategic planners. They dealt with their suppliers, the market research agencies, which also existed neatly and tidily separated from the consulting companies. While market research developed increasingly sophisticated and accurate methods, they still gained little or no influence on company policies and actions. Strategic planners on the other side appeared to be a kind of unchallenged wizards, who created visions of the future development of companies and markets with little need for such profane information as the current number of customers, market shares etc. But now this lack of contact to reality is jeopardizing the confidence of management in strategic planning. The strategic planners have lost their formerly powerful position, the days of creative meetings and metaplan sessions are gone forever. Now, for a change, the accountants have taken over! It is so much easier not to face uncertain market prospects and not to look at "intangible" corporate strengths and weaknesses but to analyse the past financial performance of a business and to grow by buy outs and mergers.