Megan McNeil, product manager for Lean and Mean (L&M) weight reduction company,
ID: 442290 • Letter: M
Question
Megan McNeil, product manager for Lean and Mean (L&M) weight reduction company, is considering offering its own brand of prepared dinners to its clients. Clients would order the dinners, usually a month’s supply at a time, from L&M’s website and have them delivered to their home address. The dinners would, of course, encourage weight loss, but would also be more nutritious, tastier, and easier to prepare than current grocery store offerings. The price would mostly likely be on the high end of the scale.
The product design team has constructed the framework for
a house of quality from initial customer interviews. Now the
team is set to perform a competitive assessment by selecting
three popular grocery store brands and measuring the design
characteristics. As the team works on the house, it is antici-
pated that additional design characteristics may emerge.The
target row of the house would represent L&M’s new brand.
Complete the following house of quality, and write a report
to Megan containing your recommendations for the new prod-
uct development. Be sure to explain how you arrived at your
conclusions.
Explanation / Answer
House of quality represents “what is desired / wanted by the consumers” and “how companies are going to fulfil the desires / wants shown by the customer”.
Initial customer interviews have already indicated what customers want and three popular brands are already selected.
These selected brands are put in to benchmarking study. That identifies the ways by that brands are meeting consumer demands.
It will put light on various aspects of product design such as:
Above design parameters can emerge in addition to the parameter already identified by L&M such as taste, nutritious, weight loss among the others mentioned in question.
On the basis of above analysis, L&M can add additional attributes to their product in product design stage so that customers’ want is satisfied and L&M gains significant ground in that market segment.
Above recommendation is purely based upon the wants exhibited by the consumer. Meeting those demands will help companies to gain bigger market share and it will make house hold name.