Design for Marketing Mix: The Past, Present, and Future of Market-Driven Product Design

The four Ps of the Marketing Mix are defined as Product, Price, Place and Promotion. The last forty years of engineering design research has seen an increased incorporation of preference into the design process in response to meeting the demands of each ‘P’. This incorporation began with surrogates of preference in Design for Product problem formulations where an objective (such as minimizing weight, for example) represented a firm’s desire to reduce cost and maximize profit. As our community progressed toward Design for Price problem formulations, we began to represent preferences both of the designer — using decision theory techniques — and of the customer — often in the form of random utility models that then informed models of demand. The Design for Market System special session was created in response to our transition to Design for Place, though much work remains to be done. The objective of this paper is to highlight the advancements of the community through the first two P’s (Product and Price) while also highlighting the need, and exciting research opportunities, that exist as we transition to Design for Place and Design for Promotion.