Analyzing the Variety of Customer Needs for Product Family Design by Integrating Conjoint Analysis and Quality Function Deployment

By analyzing the background of product family strategy, the significance of understanding and measuring the variety of customer needs is confirmed first and the starting point of product family strategy is proposed as defining the market extent and studying the customer preference in this paper. Then the metric is defined to measure the variety of customer needs. At last, a comprehensive method is proposed on how to measure the variety of customer needs within the framework of product family design by integrating Conjoint Analysis and QuaLity Function Deployment. By way of illustration, the variety of customer needs in the market extent of medium car is analyzed and its results demonstrate the effectiveness and practical value of the method.