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Abstract This paper presents DELI, a new interactive tool for supporting new product development decisions. DELI addresses the 'chicken and egg' problem in new product development: a product's features shape the way that the market is segmented and targeted, but that very segmentation/targeting itself determines which features the product needs to incorporate. It is very useful, therefore, to be able to look at attributes, product positions and segments in a 'single hit' to measure the key trade-offs available. DELI integrates segmentation, visualisation of competitive structures and the segment-specific identification of new product functionality. Several interactive features support the search for new products. Furthermore, the authors introduce a novel conditional segmentation, mapping and positioning approach for an improved representation of products and customers within one map, supporting interpretation and segment-specific new product development.
INTRODUCTION
In early phases of new product development, management faces the challenge to select from a wide variety of potential feature attributes or product benefits to be included in a new product concept. In order to extract the right features, market research, in particular conjoint analysis, is used to measure customers' preferences. Conjoint analysis aims at identifying the most important attributes for customers in order to find (segment-specific) optimal product configurations.1-3 Although there are several software solutions for conducting conjoint analyses and estimating parameters, these tools provide poor graphical support, focusing mainly on simulating shares-of-preference for well-defined scenarios.
Adaptive conjoint analysis,4 one of the most frequently applied conjoint tools, allows the incorporation of more attributes than other approaches (eg choice-based conjoint analysis).5 For designing the conjoint analysis, however, one has to collect knowledge about the most interesting benefits or new product features and customer requirements. When the number of attributes and levels is exhaustive, the required interview time and the number of interviews become prohibitive even for adaptive conjoint analysis. Therefore, a conjoint analysis often follows a more general market research study in which the relevant product attributes, benefits or shortcomings of existing products are identified. The approach presented in this paper aims at supporting this task. In this early development phase, new product developers are interested in questions of the following type.
* What are the interesting new features or benefits for a new product?
* How do specific customer...