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  3. What happens when you combine product design skills, high-powered market research techniques, and abundant customer data? Too of

What happens when you combine product design skills, high-powered market research techniques, and abundant customer data? Too of

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问题     What happens when you combine product design skills, high-powered market research techniques, and abundant customer data? Too often, the result is devices that suffer from "feature creep" or the return of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise by customers who wanted something different after all. That kind of waste is bad enough in normal times, but in a downturn it can take a fearsome toll.
    The trouble is that most customer-preference rating tools used in product development today are blunt instruments, primarily because consumers have a hard time articulating their real desires. Asked to rate a long list of product attributes on a scale of 1 ("completely unimportant") to 10 ("extremely important"), customers are apt to say they want many or even most of them. To solve that problem, companies need a way to help customers sharpen the distinction between "nice to have" and "gotta have."
    Some companies are beginning to pierce the fog using a research technique called "Maxdiff"(Maximum Difference Scaling), which was pioneered in the 1990s. It requires customers to make a sequence of explicit trade-offs. Researchers begin by amassing a list of product or brand attributes that represent potential benefits. Then they present respondents with sets of four or so attributes at a time, asking them to select which attribute of each set they prefer most and least. Subsequent rounds of mixed groupings enable the researchers to identify the standing of each attribute relative to all the others by the number of times customers select it as their most or least important consideration.
    A popular restaurant chain recently used MaxDiff to understand why its expansion efforts were failing. In a series of focus groups and preference surveys, consumers agreed about what they wanted: more healthful meal options and updated decoration. But when the chain’s heavily promoted new menu was rolled out, the marketing team was dismayed by the results. Customers found the complex new choices confusing, and sales were sluggish in the more contemporary new outlets. The company’s marketers decided to cast the range of preferences more broadly. Using MaxDiff, they asked customers to compare eight attributes and came to a striking realization. The results showed that prompt service of hot meals and a convenient location were far more important to customers than healthful items and modern furnishings.
    The ability to predict how customers will behave can be extremely powerful. Companies planning cross-border product rollouts need a tool that is free of cultural bias. And as customer tastes fragment, product development teams need reliable techniques for drawing bright lines between customer segments based on the features that matter most to each group. Companies are starting to apply MaxDiff analysis to those issues as well.
The result of the combination of the three things mentioned in Paragraph 1 is ________.
选项 A、the possibility of billions of dollars’ profit
B、that customers suffer from "feature creep"
C、worsening economic situation, or even downturn
D、a waste of products different from customers’ need
答案D
解析 根据the result定位到第一段第二句。该段第一句以What happens…?提问，引起读者思考，其中谈到了产品设计技巧、强大的市场研究技术和丰富的客户数据，此即为题干中所提到的三件事。第二句的the result is后的内容为本题答案，is后接两个表语，用连词or连接，而后半部分说的return，是由于与顾客需求不同而导致的(who wanted something different)，D项所说与文章意思一致，为本题答案。A项与原文意思正好相反，原文说的是导致价值数十亿美元的商品退货(of billions of dollars’ worth)。第一段第二句中确实有提到特征蔓延的问题，但是其所在定语从句修饰的是devices，也就是说，是devices遭受特征蔓延的问题，而非顾客，因此排除B项。第一段最后一句是三件事结合造成的浪费(That kind of waste)所带来的负面影响，bad和fearsome toll表示其确实会给企业带来可怕的影响，但还没有严重到C项所说的“加剧经济状况恶化甚至衰退”，因此C项也可排除。
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