Identifying Unfulfilled Needs In The Marketplace
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The correct identification of what current or potential buyers "want" from a particular class of products or services is key to the ability to efficiently develop new products, and to improve overall customer satisfaction and retention for currently existing products. There is a large body of literature in the field of marketing research that discusses various approaches to "benefit analysis" and/or "benefit segmentation." Burke takes the issue one step further by delving into two aspects of the way people evaluate a product or service: the benefits they "wanted" to receive, and the benefits they actually "got" from the product or service. This is known as a "dual scaling" approach, where Burke takes two measures for each product or service attribute: a "want" rating and a "got" rating. Analysis of the gaps between these "wants" and "gots" provides the following analytical benefits to the marketer:
- It directly measures existing (or potential) customers unmet needs (need gaps) under normal product/service usage conditions.
- It is not confined to currently existing products or services, but can represent broad need areas, possibly leading to the identification of promising new "breakthrough" product/service opportunities.
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Burke's Benefit Deficiency Analysis® (BDA®)
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Burke's BDA® (Benefit Deficiency Analysis®) is a research technique that is especially designed to focus on people's unmet needs. The primary objective of this technique is to help clients:
- Optimally position their current products and services, and
- Develop new products/services that address specific unmet needs, using a proactive approach instead of reactively testing concepts that have been developed within the company.
While qualitative research can also be used to meet these objectives, BDA was designed to provide a quantitative structured approach that allows for the measurement of the size of needs segments, and the relative importance among needs.
BDA itself was developed to meet an under fulfilled need in the marketing research industry, that is, to address what was missing from other approaches to benefit analysis. Therefore, BDA was designed to measure not only how consumers feel about what they now have, but to also identify what they would like to have in addition to what is currently offered in the marketplace.
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The BDA technique addresses two major marketing issues:
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Burke's BDA® (Benefit Deficiency Analysis®) is a research technique that is especially designed to focus on people's unmet needs. The primary objective of this technique is to help clients:
- New product and service development, especially providing direction for technical development efforts
- Product positioning issues, especially focusing on how to emphasize one's own strengths while pointing out the weaknesses of the competition.
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Using BDA, Burke accomplishes the following for its clients when the need to examine product or service benefits arises:
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Burke's BDA® (Benefit Deficiency Analysis®) is a research technique that is especially designed to focus on people's unmet needs. The primary objective of this technique is to help clients:
- Identify wants or needs that are not being met (Deficiencies)
- Identify wants or needs that are being delivered in excess (Surpluses)
- Identify product or service features that "drive the category"
- Identify benefit deficiency segments (i.e., group people together with similar unmet needs and profile them on usage, demographics, etc.)
- Develop a priority list for improvement based on
- level of importance of each feature or attribute
- degree of deficiency/surplus exhibited by client
- client position vs. competitors.
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Case History - Benefit Deficiency Analysis
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A large manufacturer of packaged goods was interested in expanding into food categories where they currently had no offerings. They wanted to understand the "gaps" in each of these categories in order to develop a product line that would satisfy key unmet consumer needs, while delivering on all of the "minimum requirements" that consumers had come to expect from products in this category.
Burke's BDA technique was used to identify several "want" segments describing what consumers most desired from products in the category. These key "wants" were crossed with consumer specified "gaps" between what was wanted and what was received in order to identify the key unmet needs for each segment and to identify new product development priorities with the largest payback potential to the client company. Burke was able to rank order alternative product development strategies by simultaneously analyzing the size of each potential "want-got" segment, the minimum required product features for each segment, the key gaps of current product offerings as perceived by each segment, and the company's ability to deliver on the minimum requirements and key "opportunity" gaps.
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