Alleviating feature fatigue of multi-generation products

Purpose – Feature fatigue (FF) will lead to negative Word-Of-Mouth (WOM), which damages the brand’s long-term profit and ultimately decreases the manufacturer’s customer equity (CE). It becomes severer in multi-generation products because of the significant impacts of earlier generation products on the CE of later ones. The purpose of this paper is to alleviate FF, it is imperative for designers to decide what features should be integrated to balance initial revenue and long-term profit so as to maximize CE. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, a novel method based on the Norton-Bass model is proposed to alleviate FF of multi-generation products to help designers find optimal feature combination that maximizes CE. The authors take the effects of adding features on product capability and usability into account, and integrate product capability, usability, WOM and earlier-generation product’s effects into the Norton-Bass model to predict the impacts of FF on CE in current product development. A case study of a virtual product is presented to illustrate and validate the proposed method. Findings – The advantage of the proposed method is highlighted in the cases of large feature number, high-product complexity (low-product usability) and multi-generation products. The experiments show that the earlier generations do affect the later ones from the perspective of maximizing CE. The superiority of the proposed method compared with the traditional way to put all potential features into a product during the product development is demonstrated. And the more features, the larger CE obtained using the proposed model than the one obtained by traditional way. Originality/value – Although, there are reports attempting to analyze and alleviate FF, most of these studies still suffer the limitations that cannot point out what features should be added to the product with the objective of maximizing CE. In addition, few studies have been carried out to alleviate FF of multi-generation products. A novel method based on the Norton-Bass model and a genetic algorithm is proposed to alleviate FF of multi-generation products to help designers find optimal feature combination that maximizes CE.