3-Tuple Linguistic Distance-Based Model for a New Product go/no-go Evaluation

There is a need for a probabilistic linguistic term set model for go/no-go product screening problem for new product development to meet a firm’s expectation. This paper develops a novel 3-tuple linguistic distance-based model to evaluate whether an overall respondents perception meets a firm’s expectation (“go”) for new product development. The respondent’s perception is collected by a Kansei-based survey as an interval-linguistic term. Then, an expected distance between the firm’s expectation and the respondent’s perception is computed by a target-based Manhattan distance measure. The expected distance is compared with a threshold to shows that what product attribute meets the firm’s expectation based on customers’ perceptions. A real case study of Thai-tea soy milk packaging design is provided. The proposed model is compared to the existing model to show its effectiveness and applicability. Experimental results show that the proposed model can effectively point out the inferior product attributes, which leads to redesign the product until all product concepts meet the target attributes before launching the product to the market. Thus, it can significantly reduce the risk of failure of the product in a real market. This paper has significant contributions in that it allows respondents to provide their opinions with uncertainty by providing an interval linguistic assessment, handles a bias of the heterogeneity of respondents by determining the weight of respondents, and overcomes limitations of existing models by applying target-oriented linguistic terms.