Navigating redesign and market desirability implications when considering increased product variety

Current engineering change and market analysis tools provide discipline-specific feedback about the ramifications associated with offering increased product variety for an existing product. Engineering change tools provide ways to calculate and manage the risks associated with change propagation due to product modification, while strides in market research enable the modelling of consumer preferences for individual respondents. Yet, outcomes from these tools have not been adequately combined to explore the trade-off between engineering rework and consumer acceptance of the modified product. This work integrates the Change Prediction Method (CPM) and discrete choice analysis to simultaneously consider the engineering and business-side ramifications of offering increased variety by adding new product options. Outputs from the CPM are used to create a tradeoff plot between estimated market share gains and product cost when redesign effort is considered. This approach is applied to a gas grill problem to demonstrate how such trades can be considered when determining if a product option should be offered to increase product variety.