Asking about and Predicting Consumer Preference: Implications for New Product Development

Designers do not merely develop concepts; they are increasingly involved in testing product concepts and learning consumer preference. However, designers’ decision making processes in these tasks have been little studied. In the two essays, I apply decision making frameworks to concept testing and preference learning to study consumer’s and designer’s biases. In my first essay, I study consumer bias in concept testing. When consumers test new products, they are often asked to choose which product they prefer. However, a choice question can elicit biased preference because consumers simply choose the product that is superior on the attribute serving their purchase purpose. My studies show that when consumers are asked to predict which product they will enjoy more, they are more likely to prefer the product that actually reflects their consumption utility. These findings suggest that making trade-offs is avoided in the choice question, but is encouraged in the enjoyment prediction question. Thus, a simple change of question format, in otherwise identical product comparisons, elicits different answers. This holds true when product attributes are easy to evaluate; when product attributes are hard to evaluate, changing question format does not affect consumer choice. My second essay examines designer bias in preference learning. When designers predict consumer preference for a product, they often base their predictions on consumer preference for similar products. However, this categorization-based strategy can result in biased predictions because categorical similarity is not diagnostic for preference prediction. I conducted two studies by applying a Multiple Cue Probability Learning experiment to a designer’s prediction task. I found that when subjects used a sequential learning strategy, making a sequence of predictions and receiving feedback, they increased prediction accuracy by 14% on average. When they made predictions with multiple sets, with a break between each set during which they reflected on what they had learned, their prediction accuracy further improved by 7% on average. In sum, I demonstrate bias and propose approaches to avoid them in two design tasks. My two essays show that the decision making frameworks are crucial in understanding and improving the successful outcome of the design process.Ph