Tag Archives: New product development

*Event

Bridging theory and practice: My CSULB talk on consumer-centric design

Leave a comment

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Apostle Incubator. This is a course designed by Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (IIE) at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). This interdisciplinary, entrepreneurial program brought together students from diverse backgrounds, creating a lively atmosphere for our discussion on understanding consumers.

In my talk, I shared insights from my project experience with Korean designers, where we explored how companies can use psychology to improve product design and boost sales. One project I discussed involved creating product bundles. I explained how even small changes can have a big impact on whether people decide to buy.

The students were curious and engaged, asking thoughtful questions. One asked, “What’s the difference between Samsung and Apple?” Others questioned about which marketing tools these companies uses now. We even touched on how Google Nest might face similar questions when trying to bundle products effectively.

Overall, it was inspiring to see the students’ enthusiasm. Many left with new ideas on how to think about consumers in their own projects. I am excited to see where these future entrepreneurs take these insights.

*Event

Interpret Voice of the Customer (VoC) from a customer’s perspective

Leave a comment

I was recently invited by Professor Aguinaldo Santos to give a lecture to his design students at Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR). In this lecture, I introduced my collaborative project experience with a team of Digital Appliance (DA) Business Divisionan at Samsung Electronics. They develope washers, dryers, and refrigerators, to name a few.

The team members were familiar with the VoC (Voice of the Customer), which is defined as “a hierarchical set of “customer needs” where each need (or set of needs) has assigned to it a priority which indicates its importance to the customer (Griffin and Hauser 1993, p. 2).” They collected tons of feedback and expectations about their products.

Although their effort in comprehensively collecting VoC was impressive, the way they interpret VoC was not rigorous sufficiently. They could not help but rely on intuition or expertise, interpreting VoC in a biased way.

To debias VoC interpretation, we employed the Goal Systems Theory. Since this theory illustrates why people behave in such a way (e.g., I choose rucola because I want to lose 10 pounds), it enabled them to understand VoC from the writer’s viewpoint.

Then, we developed a guideline about how to interpret VoC from a customer’s perspecitve, and examined its effectiveness by testing 3,500 VoC. One lesson we have learned is that frequently reported VoC was not always the right source of innovation. Instead, the VoC connected with an important goal, though not frequently reported, pointed to the right direction.

Reference 1

Griffin, A., & Hauser, J. R. (1993). The Voice of the Customer. Marketing Science, 12(1), 1–27.

In recent years, many U.S. and Japanese firms have adopted Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is a total-quality-management process in which the “voice of the customer” is deployed throughout the R&D, engineering, and manufacturing stages of product development. For example, in the first “house” of QFD, customer needs are linked to design attributes thus encouraging the joint consideration of marketing issues and engineering issues. This paper focuses on the “Voice-of-the-Customer’ component of QFD, that is, the tasks of identifying customer needs, structuring customer needs, and providing priorities for customer needs. In the identification stage, we address the questions of ( 1 ) how many customers need be interviewed, (2) how many analysts need to read the transcripts, (3) how many customer needs do we miss, and (4) are focus groups or one-on-one interviews superior? In the structuring stage the customer needs are arrayed into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary needs. We compare group consensus (affinity) charts, a technique which accounts for most industry applications, with a technique based on customer-sort data. In the stage which provides priorities we present new data in which product concepts were created by product-development experts such that each concept stressed the fulfillment of one primary customer need. Customer interest in and preference for these concepts are compared to measured and estimated importances. We also address the question of whether frequency of mention can be used as a surrogate for importance. Finally, we examine the stated goal of QFD, customer satisfaction. Our data demonstrate a self-selection bias in satisfaction measures that are used commonly for QFD and for corporate incentive programs. We close with a brief application to illustrate

**

Reference 2

Kruglanski, A. W., Shah, J. Y., Fishbach, A., Friedman, R., Chun, W. Y., & Sleeth-Keppler, D. (2018). A theory of goal systems. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Department, Vol. 34, pp. 331–378). Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Academic Press.

The theory outlined in the present chapter adopts a cognitive approach to motivation. In the pages that follow we describe a research program premised on the notion that the cognitive treatment affords conceptual and methodological advantages enabling new insights into problems of motivated action, self-regulation, and self-control. We begin by placing our work in the broader historical context of social psychological theorizing about motivation and cognition. We then present our theoretical notions and trace their implications for a variety of psychological issues, including activity experience, goal commitment, choice, and substitution. The gist of the chapter that follows describes our empirical research concerning a broad range of phenomena informed by the goal-systemic analysis.

*Event

Bundle multiple products in a human-centered way

Leave a comment

I recently gave a lecture at Ecobee, a smart home product company in Canada. In this lecture, I compared two different approaches when bundling multiple smart home products.

One is product-centered bundling; they can select a hero product or a product that contributes to their sales significantly and then attach additional products randomly. The other is human-centered (service-centered) bundling; they can select multiple products to form a service which helps consumers achieve their goals.

The product-centered bundling was previously employed among Samsung designers; they selected Galaxy mobile phone or Samsung TV and then added smart door lock or smart plug to create Multi Device Experience. However, we proposed them to adopt the human-centered (service-centered) approach.

The more I become interested in cognitive interventions, the more I delve into motivational goals. This is because we are able to change their behaviors if we know why consumers do what they do. I wish Ecobee designers apply goal to solve their business problems.

**

Reference 1

Kruglanski, A. W., Shah, J. Y., Fishbach, A., Friedman, R., Chun, W. Y., & Sleeth-Keppler, D. (2018). A theory of goal systems. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Department, Vol. 34, pp. 331–378). Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Academic Press.

The theory outlined in the present chapter adopts a cognitive approach to motivation. In the pages that follow we describe a research program premised on the notion that the cognitive treatment affords conceptual and methodological ad- vantages enabling new insights into problems of motivated action, self-regulation, and self-control. We begin by placing our work in the broader historical context of social psychological theorizing about motivation and cognition. We then present our theoretical notions and trace their implications for a variety of psychological issues, including activity experience, goal commitment, choice, and substitution. The gist of the chapter that follows describes our empirical research concerning a broad range of phenomena informed by the goal-systemic analysis.

**

Reference 2

Hwang, S., Park, H., Sohn, M., Yoo, D., Han, C., & Joo, J. (2022). Goal based bundling: A behaviorally informed strategy to combine multiple smart products. In G. Bruyns & H. Wei (Eds.), IASDR (International Association of Societies of Design Research) 2021 – [ _ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes (pp. 2888–2901). Singapore: Springer.

Contemporary electronic manufacturers struggle with how to develop attractive bundles by combining their existing smart products. In the present work, we propose Goal Based Bundling (GBB) by drawing on the academic research of goal systems theory (Kruglanski et al. 2018) and shed light on two previously ignored aspects of bundling strategy: service and glue product. We applied our GBB to a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics, whose goal was to develop new product bundles for kids by combining multiple smart home products. We constructed a framework of Samsung Electronics’ smart products and then visualized it on its sales website. A UI design conveying the value of smart products bundle was developed based on GBB structure. We discuss the process and the result of our project to provide insights into the product managers who combine existing smart products to develop a bundle.

Cases

Will be canned wine successful?

Leave a comment

I drink wine often. It goes well with dinner, helps me read papers, and soothes me at night. In the past, I enjoyed numerous marriages of soil, weather, and grape variety. Now, my tongue is developed although I neither remember one nor am able to elaborate why I like one.

Recently, I went to Urban Break 2021 and saw a pop-up store of Babe Wine, a brand name of a canned wine. It attracted a crowd of visitors. Out of curiosity, I sampled a sip of Grigio, Rose, and Red. They differed from the wine I experienced before. They came out from icy-cold cans and had bubbles. I ended up failing to like this wine.

Despite of my disappointment, this canned wine attracts attention internationally. “From 2016-2020, BABE’s CAGR was nearly 2,000% according to IRI. These numbers quickly caught the eye of beverage giant Anheuser-Busch, who acquired Babe in 2019.” According to the article in Forbes, “Babe specifically focused on targeting the wine lover who cracked open bottles on the regular, but “couldn’t name a single brand,” says Ostrovsky.”” 

Why do people like a canned wine I do not? Indeed, I have a long history of prediction errors. On one hand, I once thought that BTS, Tiktok, and Instagram would fail to make a presence. On the other hand, I expected that Clubhouse, a social audio app, and Gathertown, a meta-verse service, would succeed in Korea. Not surprisingly, my predictions were proven to be incorrect.

Then, how could experts like me (e.g., wine lovers) predict whether a product is successful in the market when it is designed for novices (e.g., canned wine)? About 10 years ago, researchers at University of Oxford and New York University suggested that an accurate prediction of an extreme event is an indication of poor forecasting ability. This suggests that even experts who have forecasting abilities predict only non-radical events. Predicting the next hit is beyond our control.

***

Reference

Denrell, J., & Fang, C. (2010). Predicting the Next Big Thing: Success as a Signal of Poor Judgment. Management Science, 56(10), 1653–1667.

Successfully predicting that something will become a big hit seems impressive. Managers and entrepreneurs who have made successful predictions and have invested money on this basis are promoted, become rich, and may end up on the cover of business magazines. In this paper, we show that an accurate prediction about such an extreme event, e.g., a big hit, may in fact be an indication of poor rather than good forecasting ability. We first demonstrate how this conclusion can be derived from a formal model of forecasting. We then illustrate that the basic result is consistent with data from two lab experiments as well as field data on professional forecasts from the Wall Street Journal Survey of Economic Forecasts.

Cases

How to breathe better with a mask

1 Comment

Wearing a mask becomes common as the spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus disease) dominates our lives. However, people find it difficult to breathe with a mask. I recently found an interesting new product for masks at Granhand where I visited to buy droppers or incenses for my office.

Though you can not seize nor hold the smell, it has a decisive effect on the matter of our memory and emotion and believes on its vitally of influences on our decision among our lives. GRANHAND gives faith towards the value of the fragrance and consistently pursues to make the scent part of our regular living. Although it may be slow nor has perfection, the variety of contents that our brand is offering will build the unique value of the experience that no other brand will possess. GRANHAND will not be a product where it vanishes with ease nor be neglected. It will continuously illuminate with a distinct presence and yield to warm people’s mind.

This store sells a natural oil named as “On Your Mask.” When we spray it inside the mask, we could breathe in a fresh way. This oil impressed me a lot because when I think about a mask in the past, I paid attention exclusively to its practical functionality. In other words, I simply ignored how much comfortable I should feel when wearing it.

Customer experience is not dried up for new product development.

***

Reference

Kornish, L. J., & Ulrich, K. T. (2011). Opportunity Spaces in Innovation: Empirical Analysis of Large Samples of Ideas. Management Science, 57(1), 107–128.

A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might be generated multiple times, because parallel exploration processes typically operate without information about the ideas that have already been identified. In this paper we analyze repetition in five data sets comprising 1,368 opportunities and use that analysis to address three questions: (1) When a large number of efforts to generate ideas are conducted in parallel, how likely are the resulting ideas to be redundant? (2) How large are the opportunity spaces? (3) Are the unique ideas more valuable than those similar to many others? The answer to the first question is that although there is clearly some redundancy in the ideas generated by aggregating parallel efforts, this redundancy is quite small in absolute terms in our data, even for a narrowly defined domain. For the second question, we propose a method to extrapolate how many unique ideas would result from an unbounded effort by an unlimited number of comparable idea generators. Applying that method, and for the settings we study, the estimated total number of unique ideas is about one thousand for the most narrowly defined domain and greater than two thousand for the more broadly defined domains. On the third question, we find a positive relationship between the number of similar ideas and idea value: the ideas that are least similar to others are not generally the most valuable ones.

Cases

Design Thinking vs. Behavioral Economics

Leave a comment

Crate and Barrel sells various cookware. Most products in this store are grouped into product categories. However, some are grouped into why we need them. The two “ad hoc categories” are [7 Essentials for Every Kitchen] and [Everything You Never Knew You Needed].

 

 

Ad hoc categories, coined by Barsalou, motivate impulse buying. I bought some tools I did not plan ahead and saw some customers standing in front of the two sections for a while.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. (1983), “Ad hoc categories,” Memory & Cognition, 11 (3), 211-227.

People construct ad hoc categories to achieve goals. For example, constructing the category of “things to sell at a garage sale” can be instrumental to achieving the goal of selling unwanted possessions. These categories differ from common categories (e.g., “fruit,” “furniture”) in that ad hoc categories violate the correlational structure of the environment and are not well established in memory. Regarding the latter property, the category concepts, concept-to-instance associations, and instance-to-concept associations structuring ad hoc categories are shown to be much less established in memory than those of common categories. Regardless of these differences, however, ad hoc categories possess graded structures (i.e., typicality gradients) as salient as those structuring common categories. This appears to be the result of a similarity comparison process that imposes graded structure on any category regardless of type.

Interestingly, the two ad hoc categories in the Crate and Barrel tap into different psychological processes. [7 Essentials for Every Kitchen] are the products used by others. They nudge you to follow others, which is often recommended by behavioral economists. In contrast, [Everything You Never Knew You Needed] are the products useful for you. They help you discover your own unmet needs, which is always suggested by design thinkers.

Then, which framing is more effective between “competing against others” and “following your heart”?

 

 

We can answer this question by comparing the sales numbers between spatula and dual citrus squeezer. The two products belonged to the [Everything You Never Knew You Needed] four years ago. Now, only spatula belongs to the [7 Essentials for Every Kitchen]. If spatula sales have increased and squeezer sales did not, behavioral economics beats design thinking. In contrast, if spatula sales dropped and squeezer sales did not, design thinking beats behavioral economics.

 

 

Publications

Empathy instruction backfires designers

Leave a comment

 

 

Abstract

Background: Empathy instruction (“please empathize with the person in the narrative”) is often provided when new product concepts are evaluated in a narrative form. However, concept evaluators tend to empathize with users differently; non-designers empathize with them insufficiently whereas designers do so sufficiently. Therefore, we expect that the effect of empathy instruction on concept evaluation will differ depending on the design expertise of individual evaluators. Empathy instruction will benefit non-designers whereas it may not benefit designers. We hypothesize that non-designers evaluate a concept more positively while designers evaluate the same concept more negatively when empathy instruction is provided than when it is not.

Methods: We conducted two studies with 74 practitioners (study 1) and 87 undergraduate students (study 2) by asking participants to evaluate a new service concept for long-distance communication. Half of the participants were provided with empathy instruction (“please watch a video clip about a long-distance couple”) and the other half were provided with control instruction (“please watch a video clip about nature). Then, we compared the concept evaluation scores between the two groups.

 

 

Results: The two studies showed that when the participants received control instruction, their concept evaluation scores between two groups did not differ. However, when they received empathy instruction, non-designers’ concept evaluation scores increased whereas designers’ concept evaluation scores decreased.

Conclusion: Our findings highlight the dark side of empathy in concept evaluation. When empathy instruction is provided for narrative concept evaluation, it needs to be used carefully depending on the individual concept evaluators. More discussions are needed for customized empathy.

 

Keywords

Concept evaluation, design expertise, empathy instructon, narrative concept, new product development

 

 

Courses

New product project: Stain free

Leave a comment

“Stain Free” gives a proactive solution for those who concern about makeup stain on the clothes while getting dressed and undressing the clothes. It is portable silicon collar made from organic material so there should be no harm on the skin. Customers will put “Stain Free” on the collar of her or his clothes before getting dressed and undressing so it prevents the stain. After using “Stain Free”, customers will be able to easily remove the stain on the product, so they can use the product in a clean condition as frequently as they need.

NPD_Stain freeAlthough Make up stain is classified into temporary stains, it is still hard to be removed as cosmetic is composed with complex chemicals. We have found many people online looking for reactive solutions to remove the makeup stain and sharing the solutions with others. After surveying 70 women, we have realized that every one of them has experienced makeup stain on the shirt and they wished they had a product that can prevent. Out of all the opportunities we have come up with, “Stain Free” was evaluated by RWW Chart as the most feasible with the greatest competitive advantages and it was financially prospective. However, the result was not over “108”, therefore we were still required to improve our opportunity based on the customer’s need. We found the product called “Face Cover” as our potential competitor. However, we also found a number of disadvantages of the product from the reviews on the internet as well as the 1 on 1 interview we conducted. As well, we have drawn a couple of personas with two different life-styles in order to figure out how “Stain Free” will adapt on our customer’s daily life. Eventually, it was clear to see that customers demand the convenient, market available, and affordable product.

Based on the insight we have examined earlier, we improved a number of attributes of our product such as materials, design and the ways of distribution etc By writing HOQ, we were finally able to specify the product and also generated a number of concepts of our product to meet our customer’s needs. We have selected the product made from silicon as our ultimate concept after evaluating 3 different concepts with Pugh Matrix and we expect see our annual revenue over $113,400.

 

Written by Seunghyun Yoon, Sooyoen Lee, Yurim Lee, and Mohammed | New Product Development 2016 Spring | College of Business Administration, Kookmin University

 

Courses

New product project: Cup crash

Leave a comment

Cup crush

How many cups of coffee do you drink a day? Nowadays, it easy to find people holding a cup of coffee in your surroundings. Coffee has become a commodity in our lives. However, as demand for coffee has increased, it also increased the number of disposable cups. This causes trash bin to be over floated which leads to environmental problems. For these reasons we planned to make a new product for environmental protection. And we focused on reducing the amount of trash.

NPD_Cup crash

Well, there are various ways to reduce waste. For example, we could increase the number and volume of trash bin. Or we could also try to reduce the size of trash. However, we think it is most effective to decrease the volume of trash. It’s because it has spatial limitations as we increase the size of trash bin, and also it can’t solve essential environment issues. But in contrast, reducing the volume of trash has many great benefits.

As a solution to minimize the volume of the coffee cup, we came up with the idea of paint bucket. It is effective to reduce the volume of the cup. If you simply press the top and bottom part of the cup, you can reduce more than one third of the volume. This product is more effective than the existing products because the existing products require more force and once it is squashed, it seems that there is not a huge difference in terms of volume. Furthermore, our differentiated design may provide freshness to customers. Not only that, it arouses a trend of participating in an event of reducing trash which leads to saving environment.

Our main targets are both individuals who sell coffee and who drink coffee. From the perspective of cafe owner it allows them to keep their cafe clean and reduce the cost of refuse disposal by reducing the amount of trash. From the perspective of people who drink coffee, customer can give such positive effect that has been mentioned. Also, our product can create social trend that has image of protecting environment by reduction of trash. Social trend involves meaning that each and everyone will try to reduce the amount of rubbish like a campaign.

It is common sense that social trend like this which is protecting environment is healthy. However, crushing the empty cup could be tiresome for somebody. Therefore, we would like to put small sentence or character to attain user’s interest to encourage crush the cup. When the cup is completely crushed, new picture or sentence can arouse people’s interest.

In other words, by launching “Cup Crush”, It will drive a lot of benefit for not only just coffee seller and coffee buyer, but society also.

 

Written by Bohee Cheong, Donghui Kim, Hyuntaek Lee, Wonjoon Cheong, and Yan He | New Product Development 2016 Spring | College of Business Administration, Kookmin University 

Courses

New product project: Fur away

Leave a comment

 

Furaway“Fur Away” is a machine that removes animal hair on our clothes. Cat hair is so light and thin, it sticks everywhere in the house and very easy to be seen all over your clothes. It is there even after you put your clothes in laundry machine. With Fur Away, you can simply click the button to activate, and the machine does all the hard work for you. Our main target is pet owner who suffers from animal hair on their clothes.

We thought of many ways to activate the machine and narrowed down to use static electricity or air suction. We have asked several questions to 30 pet owners (10 students, 10 office workers, 10 house wives), and every single one of them has answered that they are suffering from their own pet’s hair. A majority group of pet owners have answered that they use box tape, and round-shaped modified sticky tape to remove hair. Plus, their most concerning factors were: First, spending too much time to remove hair; Second, difficulty of perfect removal; Third, product’s expendability.

Based on customer needs, we have invented a machine that looks resemble with spin-dryer which use static electricity or air suction. Inside the machine, the cylinder rotates fast and sucks pets’ hair. A strong friction will suck animal hair and capture them perfectly, so pet owners can spend less time to remove them. There were 6 alternative concepts we discussed, and problems are decomposed by creating functions and shapes: 1) Vacuum-Room; 2) Auto-brushing Room; 3) Steam-Room; 4) Adhesion-Flat; 5) Spin-Cylinder; 6) Static-Cylinder. Function tells you how to detach fur from a clothes, and shape means how the other design looks like.

As an example, room shape looks like closet that clothes can be hanged in, flat shape looks like scanner that clothes can be put in unfolded and cylinder shape has form which makes it easy to spin. These 6 concepts are scored and screened to develop the best concept. As a result, our team decided to continue develop Vacuum-room, Spin-cylinder, and Static-cylinder and discontinue others.

We surveyed 20 people who raise pet, and the result is analyzed by Q=NAP. Therefore, we set the price as 80,000Won ($75). Overall, Fur Away enables you to save time and provides convenience in removing animal hair. Also, people are desperate for this product to come out.

Written by So Yea Jeon, Ga hye Kim, Seung Beom Kim, Ji won Hyun, Kyung won Kim, Dong hyun Gim | New Product Development, Spring 2015 | College of Business Administration, Kookmin University