Customer Knowledge Development

What it measures

Measures the degree to which a new product development (NPD) project employs an ongoing, emergent, and trial-and-error process to develop understanding of evolving customer preferences across prelaunch stages (idea generation, concept refinement, product development, and product testing). The scale captures three defining characteristics of customer knowledge development: (1) the process is iterative and ongoing, with multiple rounds of customer feedback guiding successive iterations; (2) novelty at each stage emerges from customer interaction rather than from predefined plans; and (3) learning occurs via an action-based trial-and-error mode. Respondents are asked to rate items with respect to a specific recent NPD project in which they participated.

Representative items

• We went through lots of iterations based on customer feedback prior to launching the product in the market.
• We learned about customer preferences as we worked with them through the new product iterations.
• The actual new product that we took to market was very different from our initial expectation.

Citation

Joshi, A. W., & Sharma, S. (2004). Customer knowledge development: Antecedents and impact on new product performance. Journal of Marketing, 68(4), 47–59.