Prof. John R Hauser

John Hauser is an authority on a wide range of marketing and product development areas, including the design and marketing of new products, voice-of-the-customer methods, customer satisfaction incentives, market research methods, new product forecasting models, competitive marketing strategy, and metrics to manage product development. His latest research focuses on virtual customer methods, automated marketing, and product development metrics. The Virtual Customer Initiative (VCI) is a multidisciplinary approach to improving the speed, accuracy, and usability of customer input to the product development process. It is developing and testing new web-based methods to radically reduce the time lag between customer input and product development response-and with much higher quality information. Recent applications include "FastPace" methods of adaptive conjoint analysis, Greedoid methods for identifying "must have" product features, genetic algorithms to grow new product, Bayesian triggers to identify new product opportunities from virtual-advisor data, and other virtual-customer methods. (See http://mitsloan.mit.edu/vc for more information.) He is now working with MIT Sloan Professor Glen Urban on the development of web sites that "morph" in response to customers' cognitive styles. Other research includes configurators and microinvestments to involve customers in idea creation and incentive-compatible methods for improving market research data.