The Neglected Alliance: Human Factors and Market Research

The traditional role of human factors has been to support engineering activity in relating man to machines. This relationship has been uncritically accepted as appropriate in the consumer product area with the result that most human factors activity takes place during engineering development. The human factors specialist in such circumstances often finds that proper weight is not given to human factor requirements when they conflict with engineering goals. Many of these conflict problems faced by human factors specialists in achieving acceptance by manufacturers of consumer products could be resolved by demonstrating that human factors research can complement and expand the role of marketing research as it relates to new product development. Marketing research has developed as a specialized communications function to obtain and analyze information about the market and the companies' product, promotion, distribution, and pricing activities in serving it. The role of marketing research relative to product planning varies by company, many, if not most, major firms use marketing research to define the market in terms of types, numbers, and kinds of customers, customer needs regarding a product category, what products are satisfying those needs, the important product attributes, and the standards used by consumers to evaluate the efficiency of the product. This paper focuses on the areas where the role of marketing research in new product development has been ill defined. A complementary role for human factors methodology in defining new product opportunities and specific product attributes is postulated. Suggestion's are made for promoting greater awareness among marketing specialists of the benefits offered by the use of human factors research.