Developing a hybrid evaluation process for product acceptability: An empirical study in automobile industry

Product acceptability has become a very important issue as manufacturers have to decide whether product factors influence consumer decision on the purchase. In recent years, the evaluation of product acceptability has been a topic of continuous and extensive research. Unfortunately, manufacturers and designers often misunderstand what consumers really want. Hence, how to evaluate the acceptability of product is one of the key problems of product development. In this study, we proposed a hybrid evaluation process for acceptability problem in an attempt to evaluate product acceptability with better performance. A real case, car evaluation, was tested to show that the product acceptability problem can be easily evaluated and predicted using the proposed approach. The results show that it can solve the product acceptability problems and could be extended to other industries.