B-MPV Competitive Feature Evaluation Across ASEAN Markets

Duration:: April 2026

Service:: Respondent Recruitment, Fieldwork Coordination

Industry:: Automotive

The Business Issue

As the ASEAN B-MPV segment becomes increasingly competitive, a leading B-segment MPV manufacturer needed to evaluate how their existing product was performing against rising consumer expectations and competing alternatives. The core challenge was not feature discovery — the vehicle was established in the market — but feature satisfaction: which existing features were meeting expectations, which were falling short, and which carried enough perceived value to influence future purchase decisions.

The manufacturer needed a 360-degree view of product performance — not just from everyday drivers, but from the full stakeholder chain: product and technical experts, frontline dealers, and after-sales staff. Each group holds a different vantage point on where satisfaction gaps exist and why. Understanding all four perspectives simultaneously was essential to producing feature prioritisation recommendations grounded in both customer experience and commercial reality.

A multi-dimensional qualitative programme was designed and executed across Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, combining focus group discussions with current owners and in-depth interviews with three distinct expert stakeholder groups.

The Techniques

User Acceptance Focus Groups
Five focus groups were conducted per market with current owners of the vehicle. Each group evaluated 25 specific product features — covering interior design elements, comfort and convenience systems, driver assistance technology, and connectivity platforms. Participants rated each feature on three dimensions using a 5-point scale: Feature Importance (how much the feature matters to them), Current Satisfaction (how well the feature currently performs against expectations), and Purchase Intent Considering Cost (whether the feature would influence a future purchase decision if priced accordingly). This three-dimension scoring design produces an importance-satisfaction gap map — identifying features where high importance and low satisfaction signal the most urgent improvement priorities. For the methodology behind importance-satisfaction measurement and how it relates to standard customer satisfaction survey design, see our full guide.
Technical Expert In-Depth Interviews
Two product and technical experts per market were interviewed to provide perspective on demographic and lifestyle shifts among the B-MPV buyer segment, and how the vehicle’s feature set compares to competing models in the category.
Dealer In-Depth Interviews
Two frontline dealers per market were interviewed to identify the key buying factors cited by customers during the sales process and the most common objections encountered — providing commercial context for which features are actively influencing purchase decisions at point of sale.
After-Sales In-Depth Interviews
One after-sales staff member per market was interviewed to identify the highest-frequency service issues reported by owners — battery failures, mechanical complaints, and recurring maintenance concerns — providing a ground-level view of where the product is underperforming in real ownership conditions.

Fieldwork was conducted in local languages across all three markets. Iconic Research coordinated recruitment across Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, with fieldwork in Indonesia executed in partnership with a local agency partner.

The Results

The three-dimension scoring framework produced a feature prioritisation matrix across all three markets — mapping each of the 25 evaluated features against the gap between importance and current satisfaction. Features with the largest gaps were identified as the highest-priority improvement targets; features with high satisfaction and high purchase intent scores were confirmed as defensible competitive strengths.

The multi-stakeholder design ensured that owner satisfaction data was contextualised by dealer intelligence on buying factors and after-sales data on recurring failure points — producing recommendations grounded in the full commercial lifecycle of the vehicle, not just moment-of-purchase perception. Iconic Research delivered structured field data across all three markets within the project timeline, coordinating interviewer teams, quality assurance protocols, and client reporting across multiple time zones and languages.