There is a widely held view that a lack of, “…customer understanding,” is one of the
main reasons for product failure (Eliashberg et al., 1997, p. 219). This is despite the
fact that new product development (NPD) is a crucial business process for many
companies. The importance of integrating the voice of the customer (VoC) through
market research is well documented (Davis, 1993; Mullins and Sutherland, 1998;
Cooper et al., 2002; Flint, 2002; Davilla et al., 2006; Cooper and Edgett, 2008;
Cooper and Dreher, 2010; Goffin and Mitchell, 2010).
However, not all research methods are well received, for example there are
studies that have strongly criticized focus groups, interviews and surveys (e.g.
Ulwick, 2002; Goffin et al, 2010; Sandberg, 2002). In particular, a point is made that,
“…traditional market research and development approaches proved to be particularly
ill-suited to breakthrough products” (Deszca et al, 2010, p613). Therefore, in
situations where traditional techniques—interviews and focus groups—are
ineffective, the question is which market research techniques are appropriate,
particularly for developing breakthrough products? To investigate this, an attempt was
made to access the knowledge of market research practitioners from agencies with a
reputation for their work on breakthrough NPD. We were surprised to find that this
research had not been conducted previously.
In order to make it possible for the sample of 24 market research experts
identified for this study to share their knowledge, repertory grid technique was used.
This psychology based method particularly seeks out tacit knowledge by using indepth
interviews. In this case the interviews were conducted with professionals from
leading market research agencies in two countries. The resulting data provided two
unique insights: they highlighted the attributes of market research methods which
made them effective at identifying customers’ needs and they showed how different
methods were perceived against these attributes.
This article starts with a review of the literature on different methods for
conducting market research to identify customer needs. The conclusions from the
literature are then used to define the research question. We explain our choice of
methodology, including the data collection and analysis approach. Next the key
results are presented. Finally, the discussion section identifies the key insights,
clarifies the limitations of the research, suggests areas for future research, and draws
implications for managers.
We conclude that existing research is not aligned with regard to which
methods (or combination of methods) are best suited to the various stages of the NPD
process. We have set out the challenges and our own intended work in this regard in
our section on ‘further research’. Also, the existing literature does not explicitly seek
the perceptions of practitioner experts based in market research agencies. This we
have started to address, and we acknowledge that further work is required.
Although our research in ongoing, it has already yielded the first view of a
model of the perceptions of 24 expert market researchers in the UK and Denmark.
Based on the explanation of these experts, the model situates a derived set of
categories in a manner that reflects the way in which they are inter-linked. We believe
that our model begins to deal with the gaps and anomalies in the existing research into
VoC methods
