The Use of Marketing Decision Support Systems for New Product Design: A Review

Product design is an important phase of the new product development process and one of the most crucial decisions in marketing. In the latest two decades, a significant number of marketing decision support systems (MDSSs) for automating new product design activities have been reported in the literature and have contributed to the evolution of knowledge in this area. Since the insights on what constitutes the design of new products are constantly evolving, it is unclear whether research on MDSSs for new product design already covers all major aspects of product design. Therefore, the aim of this research is to determine the state of the art on MDSSs for new product design: What aspects of MDSSs for new product design have been addressed until now and which gaps remain to be covered? We performed a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed articles as published between 1998 and 2018 on MDSSs for new product design. To analyze the contributions of the papers we use the Formal Concept Analysis technique. Out of a total of 375 publications, 61 met the inclusion criteria. These publications were classified into different dimensions: MDSS types, decision-making support, distributed decision-making support, and the consideration of both consumer satisfaction and distributed environment. Our findings suggest that desktop and model-driven-based systems are the type of MDSS mostly accepted for new product design. We found that important elements of this decision-making process are seldom considered in MDSSs developed so far. These include distributed decision-making support and consideration of consumer satisfaction. In this way, future developments should consider them so that they be more consistent with the current nature of this process and support it more effectively.