Product development with data mining techniques: A case on design of digital camera

Many enterprises have been devoting a significant portion of their budget to product development in order to distinguish their products from those of their competitors and to make them better fit the needs and wants of customers. Hence, businesses should develop product designing that could satisfy the customers’ requirements since this will increase the enterprise’s competitiveness and it is an essential criterion to earning higher loyalties and profits. This paper investigates the following research issues in the development of new digital camera products: (1) What exactly are the customers’ “needs” and “wants” for digital camera products? (2) What features is more importance than others? (3) Can product design and planning for product lines/product collection be integrated with the knowledge of customers? (4) How can the rules help us to make a strategy during we design new digital camera? To investigate these research issues, the Apriori and C5.0 algorithms are methodologies of association rules and decision trees for data mining, which is implemented to mine customer’s needs. Knowledge extracted from data mining results is illustrated as knowledge patterns and rules on a product map in order to propose possible suggestions and solutions for product design and marketing.