The Repertory Grid Technique as a Customer Insight Method: The Repertory Grid Technique Is an Effective but Little-Used Technique to Uncover Customers' Hidden Needs

In order to succeed in competitive markets, new products and services must "thrill and amaze" customers (Robertson 2002, 20). Achieving this "demands profound knowledge of customers and their needs" (Karkkainen and Ka 2001, 161). Achieving this level of insight is very difficult, in part because not all customer needs are equal. Kano and colleagues (1984) defined three leveis of customer-defined attributes: basic (must-have), performance, and excitement. Must-have attributes are expected by customers, and their absence leads to dissatisfaction. For example, your car engine must start reliably, or you will be dissatisfied no matter what other features the car may offer. Performance attributes--for instance, increased fuel efficiency in a car--bring increasing levels of satisfaction with increasing performance. Excitement features bring unexpected benefits that surprise and delight customers, such as watching collaboration happen in real-time in a Google Document. A key point for product development teams is that customers are unlikely to express either basic or excitement attributes (King 1987). Instead, customers focus on performance attributes and "tend to mention needs that are already catered for" (van Kleef, van Trijp, and Luning 2005, 197). As a result, traditional market research techniques such as surveys and focus groups can lead to the development of non-differentiated "me-too" products. In such cases, "firms lose their position of industry leadership ... because they listen too carefully to their customers" (Slater and Mohr 2006, 26). Part of the problem is that the most commonly used methods for capturing the voice of the customer cannot identify the hidden needs that customers themselves may not be not aware of (Goffin et al. 2012). Customers cannot always adequately describe their needs and asking direct questions does not help to elicit needs customers may not have consciously thought of. Unable to articulate their thoughts about what they really need, respondents will instead focus on technical features or styling characteristics. To truly capture the voice of the customer, therefore, methods must go beyond customers' superficial answers to identify the hidden needs they are not fully aware of. Identifying these hidden needs enables the development of products that will delight customers by offering excitement features they may never have imagined. There are a number of customer insight methodologies that can enable firms to identify hidden needs, including ethnographic methods, empathic design, and means-end chains (Dahan and Hauser 2001). Another method, repertory grid technique (RGT), has received much less attention in the new product development literature, but may offer a simpler way to access hidden needs than the elaborate processes offered by other methods. Although it was originally developed for use in clinical psychology, RGT can be used to gain deep insights into consumers' perceptions of product attributes (Veinand et al. 2011), making it a useful technique for new product development, for products or services and for both B2B and B2C markets. It has been used in contexts as varied as evaluating B2B customers' perceptions of industrial pump control systems (Hassenzahl and Wessler 2000) and investigating customer needs for food products, wine, and tourism (Marsden and Littler 2000a). RGT has also been found to be an effective method for capturing the voice of the customer (Goffin, Lemke, and Koners 2010; Moussaoui and Varela 2010). Our work with RGT has demonstrated that it can be successfully applied to new product development in a range of contexts, for both products and services. An Introduction to RGT RGT, developed in the 1930s by clinical psychologist George Kelly (Easterby-Smith, Thorpe, and Holman 1996), is used to understand how individuals think (Goffin and Lemke 2004). RGT operates from the key assumption that individuals have a unique set of personal constructs (ways to interpret the world) that can be accurately identified (Kelly 1955). …