Marketing
Chapter 9 – developing new products and managing the product life cycle
New product development strategy
new products important for customers (new solutions and variety) and for companies (key source of
growth).
The new product development process
Eight major steps in the process:
1. Idea generation
- Internal idea sources, finding new ideas through formal R&D
- External idea sources, distributors, suppliers and competitors
- Crowdsourcing
2. Idea screening, R-W-W (real, win, worth doing?)
3. Concept development and testing
Product idea, an idea for possible product that the company can see itself offering to the market.
Product image, is the way consumers perceive an actual or potential product.
- Concept development
- Concept testing
4. Marketing strategy development
Consists of three parts:
1. Describes target market; the planned value proposition, and the sales, market share and
profit goals for the first few years
2. Outlines the product’s planned price, distribution and marketing budget for first year
3. Describes the long-term sales, profit, goals and marketing mix strategy
5. Business analysis
6. Product development
7. Test marketing
- Controlled test markets, new products and tactics are tested among controlled groups of
customers and stores
- Simulated test markets, in which researches measure consumer responses to new products
and marketing tactics in laboratory
8. Commercialisation
Managing new product development
Successful new product development requires:
- Customer-centred new product development
- Team-based new product development
- Systematic new product development, the new product development process should be
holistic and systematic rather than compartmentalised and haphazard
Innovation management system: to avoid problems like few new ideas will surface, and many
good ideas will die. The company will collect, review, evaluate and manage new product
ideas. Two outcomes:
It helps create an innovation-oriented company culture.
It will yield a larger number of new product ideas, turning them into products and
finding customers for them.
New product development in turbulent times
When a company faces financial difficulties, management may be tempted to reduce spending on
new product development.