A Method Of Evaluating The Competitiveness Of New Launched Product Based On Evidence Reasoning

Based on the new product characteristics influencing consumer adoption and the comment of earlier adopters, this article will promote a competitiveness ranking method to evaluate new launched durable products between their substitutes. Predicting the future needs of new launched product is a basic aspect of business plan and production operations. However, lots of the prediction methods are for the unlisted new product, methods for the products launched are more like trend prediction of incremental product life cycle. The sales of new launched product is still astable, but making the right judge of product competitiveness between substitutes have a great relationship with the production in near future. Nowadays there is still no systematical method for the evaluation of competitiveness of new launched product.With the universal of network medium, online comments have a more and more important persuading influence on the purchase decision of consumers. In order to low down the uncertainty of adopting, potential new product adopter will search for product information of all aspect, including characteristics of new product, expert advice and using experience of earlier adopters. From these information consumers balancing the profit and cost of adopting, then making the decision of whether to adopt the product. In this article, the competitiveness of new launched product is evaluated through the strength of the consumers will adopt. The new product adoption is actually a decision synthesizing multiple attribute. The evaluation is start from the recapitulative characteristics influencing the adoption, combining specific characteristics extracted from the comments of earlier adopters to form the competitiveness evaluation system of a given product type. For this multiple attribute decision problem, this article apply evidence reasoning method to integrate all characteristics, then gives the result of competitiveness ranking of a series of substitutes which will provide the business manager sales diagnosis(e.g, how to arrange the production in the near future or how to adjust the marketing positioning of the product).First, based on the MCDA, this article developed the evaluation systerm. Through literature searching, a summarize of general new product characteristics has been formed.Second, under the strong back ground of Internet, willing to low down the uncertainty before purchasing has promoted the earlier adopters’comments to be more trustful. The abundant information implied in the comments have a great influence in the decision of potential adopter. So this article uses foreign mature test mining method in Chinese context situation to extract specific characteristics and the emotional expression. Also there will be some characteristics not mentioned in the comment, they are described using the experts’opinion. Based on "quality ladder" to combine recapitulative characteristics and specific characteristics to form the competitiveness evaluation system of a given product type.Third, for the characteristics and emotion expression are somewhat fuzziness and incompleteness, so this article using evidence reasoning to solve the ultimate goal and this is the advantage of this method. This article proved ER can be used on the evaluation of new launched product competitiveness.Finally, this article apply the evaluation method to two durable product-tablet PC and mobile phone(8groups). In order to checking the feasibility and reliability of this method, evidence reasoning only based on expert opinion has also been tested, and the result of two method are compared to the actual sales ranking. The result using the method of this article are almost as the same with the actual sales. Specifically, few products’ranking are a little behind comparing to the actual sales. Through reading their comment it is easy to find that more quantity of comment the more negative aspects. But there are research proved that more quantity of comments will positively influence the sales. The result from the integration of experts imply that they are more optimistic about new product and usually can not evaluate the uncertainty of new product.