Product Development: Unlocking Customer Insights for Differentiated Products
The Challenge
A capital equipment manufacturer was under pricing pressure and losing share in the entry-level category. The sales team’s read was clear and expensive: the company needed to design a smaller, 110-volt machine to compete. Acting on that would have committed a year of new product development.
The Approach
Before committing engineering, we ran qualitative Voice of Customer research across the key personas in that segment to validate the stated needs and pain points. The research surfaced other candidate differentiators, and we tested those against the assumed size and voltage requirements using Conjoint Analysis — putting real trade-offs in front of real buyers.
The Results
Smaller size and 110v service did enter the purchase equation, but their effect on unit preference was small. A large segment would readily trade both for higher capacity and a touchscreen interface — vectors of differentiation worth 20+ points of unit preference at a nearly 25% higher price point. When engineering costed the newly featured unit, it came in lower than the current offering. A few weeks of research replaced a year-long development project that would have moved neither share nor revenue.
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