AN APPROACH TO PRODUCT FAMILY POSITIONING BASED ON SHARED SURPLUS

摘要

To compete in the marketplace, manufacturers have been seeking for expansion of their product lines by providing product families. Product family positioning aims at planning the appropriate products to be provided to the target market segments. Due to the involved complexity such as diverse customer preferences, engineering costs, competition among similar products, etc, positioning the product family is very difficult. This paper proposes a shared surplus model for product family positioning. A comprehensive methodology for product family positioning is developed. An application of the proposed methodology for the notebook computer family positioning is reported.