Introduction to Customers’ Hidden Needs

Many new products fail. Far too many! Products fail regularly in both the manufacturing and service sectors. By failure we mean that these new products fail to excite customers and fail to reach the sales and market share goals set by the companies that develop them. Research shows that the major reason that new products and services fail is that they are too similar to existing market offerings. New products which are hard to differentiate simply do not capture the customer’s imagination. However, the lack of differentiable features is a symptom. The cause of the problem is a poor understanding of customers’ needs. Companies need to take a radically different approach if they are to be successful at identifying customers’ real needs and this book is about innovative ways to conduct market research. Specifically, it addresses how to unveil what we will term customers’ hidden needs.