What consumers require to product is expressed as various shape and dimensions like needs, wants, and demands. As the production technology progresses, the necessity to consider consumer's needs being complex and diverse in the phase of developing product is being more important. However, existing system of consumer's needs being structured with the view of marketing cannot prescribe features of product to satisfy consumer's needs because of its categorical basis.
The goal of this study is to establish method that structuralize customer's needs for applying practically in the phase of the product concept development and to suggest guidelines to needs structuralization with emphasis on the view of cognitive science/cognitive psychology.
The major findings of this study is summerized as follows.
First, to structuralize not only customer's needs category which being used as standard to assort needs in existing way but also practical needs features, it must contain the concept of emotion that is actual product's meaning to customers in its structure, and for this reason, the structuralized needs with emotions can be defined as emotional needs structure.
Second, categorization of concept will be divided as essential concept and referential concept centering around symbolic concept, and from this supposition, emotional needs structure can be composed as benefit concept (essential concept), customer needs(referential concept) centering around emotion(symbolic concept).
Emotional needs structure established like this will be able to suggest available insight in the phase of developing basic concept of product, and help to perform with consistency in image in the phase of defining product features to embody product concept.
