Soliciting Customer Requirements for Product Conceptualization Based on Laddering Technique and ART2 Neural Network

With the increasing emphasis on customer demands by organizations, customer requirements management has secured a crucial position during the early stage of product conceptualization. However, it is still of scarcity to have a systematic strategy for soliciting customer requirements effectively. For this purpose, a customer-oriented approach has accordingly been proposed in this study. This prototype system is composed of two interrelated components, namely, the customer requirements elicitation (CRE) and customer/marketing analysis (CMA) modules. In the context of the prototype system, the laddering technique has been employed to enable the customer requirements elicitation via the so-called customer attributes hierarchy (CAH). In addition, the adaptive resonance theory (particularly ART2) neural network has also been applied as a toolkit for further customer and marketing analysis. A case study on mobile hand phone design is used as an example to validate and illustrate the prototype system