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Taking an EXPANDED View of Customers’ Needs: Qualitative Research for Aiding Innovation

HEADLINE: Social value-focused interviews can uncover customers’ real desires for new products and help yield critical insights for innovations.

Market research is limited in generating innovative product concepts because of the consumers’ inability to say what they really want or how they will really behave. Our work shows that research can generate successful product concepts by focusing on consumers’ ambivalent and confused expressions. “Articulative Interviewing Techniques” reveal the conflicts among “orienting evaluations” that lie behind ambivalent and inconsistent expressions. Market researchers and managers can, in turn, use conflict analysis to produce successful, new product concepts.

You can read the paper further down on this page, or access the paper (PDF) in Google Drive, here.

Key Information

Title: Taking an EXPANDED View of Customers’ Needs: Qualitative Research for Aiding Innovation - Maria F. Flores Letelier, Charles Spinosa, and Bobby J. Calder

Topic: Market Entry

Keywords: customers, needs, research, analysis, consumer

Type: not yet specified

Date produced: 2000

Why Read:

In this article, we first present an expanded view of customers’ needs that will allow researchers to explore the conflicts among certain kinds of values since these conflicts lie behind the ambivalences and inconsistent expressions. We then present techniques, which we call “Articulative Interviewing Techniques,” that can be used along with customer observation and other market research techniques to uncover value conflicts. Finally, we show how findings from articulative interviews can be used to design innovative product concepts. Managers do not need to rely on intuition alone; customers can in fact reveal quite a bit about the directions in which they are changing and, consequently, about new products they will bring into their lives.

Expanded view of customer needs.pdf

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