The capturing of a customer’s needs and ideas and their subsequent incorporation into the features of a new product or service are central challenges of the product development process. Meeting these challenges successfully will guarantee long-term customer satisfaction with a new product or service. It will also ensure customer loyalty and repeat or generate new orders. However, it is essential that product developers have an awareness of a customer’s needs and actually take them into consideration in their concepts as product characteristics and types. Since competition is often very intense, even the most individual customer needs have to be given as much consideration as possible by applying differentiation and diversification strategies.
