A manufacturer’s product performs excellently in many respects – even better than its competitors. Despite this, its market share falls. Resources are often wasted because of a failure to identify the cause of this development. Products are often optimized on criteria that are relatively unimportant to the consumer.
The really important factors in the design of a company’s products or services can rarely be measured directly – e.g. by asking “How important to you is...?” Such queries only touch the cognitive level of decision-making, and can lead to serious misinterpretations and thus to costly errors in marketing decisions. The aspects that really govern the decision can be measured by means of procedures that take account of the underlying relationships. These include:
