Planning and Development of New Products (I)

Do not watch the product life cycle, watch the market life cycle. Philip Kotler

Introduction

All management of markets must be very careful about the importance, scope that is generated by the decision to develop new products, since it involves many factors to take into account previous analysis of market behavior, consumer needs, the use of the opportunities.

We must also consider the reality of the company and its current role in the market where it operates, and its resources, involving from financial, human, technological and economic reality of course, politically, socially in the environment where it operates.

This time we go on analyzing the role of planning in the development of new products reach, relevance, benefits.

Basic considerations, general

Marketing scholars argue "that the plans are not planning anything because it is a victory that counts." Of course, the planning process is often much uncertainty, doubts, fears, because there are many questions that are not yet complete response. Consider important in order to give life to planning asking good questions.

For the entrepreneur the first question in the strategic planning process, most important of all, is whether having a single product or have several. Its simplicity is so significant that it is the most difficult to answer. It is dedicated to a single type of product or but several types of products in different markets, all sharing the same technology, and combinations including making their own raw materials and sell their own products. Consideration should use its technological expertise in the production of other products, or their management skills to create a totally unrelated business. Of these options the most common strategy of all is the penetration, ie work on a single product to one market, office furniture, for example. This leaves open only two options are not mutually exclusive: (i) sell more products to the same customers, and / or (ii) to get new customers for existing products. The first option is based on Kotler's statement according to which is 5 times cheaper to sell more to existing customers than acquiring new customers. Its name in fashion is "loyalty". It means designing products for the same customers but for other uses. It also means increasing the rate of use of the products activating the market for replacement and repairs.

The second option, acquire new customers, is very aggressive, because it means to persuade customers not to buy from competitors. But this conflict is easily resolved when the demand for one type of product is growing rapidly because there will be products for everyone, even, perhaps not enough installed capacity to produce all the products required by the market, making the win-win growth. However, when demand shrinks and stops, the only way to continue selling is to take the nearest competitor sales. So, if product sales suddenly stop, is sure evidence that the benefits of product that might have had were only sustainable during times of expansion when the customer needs the product two types of protection that should have been taken, have been changed the product making it very different and more useful through the design and use of materials, and alternately change the positioning of the brand. Both decisions have to be taken prior to contract demand flow is when the planning process fulfills its main function and begin to find ways to create opportunities for when the right time will use the previously patterned series of strategies and given priority to strategists with experience.

What steps should be considered in the development of new products?

Wikipedia says about it that there are several steps in the process of developing new products:

Generation of ideas ideas for new products obtained from clients, Research & Development (R & D), competition, target groups, employees and trade fairs. some formal techniques for generating ideas include creating lists, forced relationships, brainstorming, morphological analysis and problem analysis.

Filtering the idea of ​​eliminating concepts that do not fit we should ask ourselves three questions: Is the target market will benefit from the product? Is it technically feasible to manufacture this product? Will it generate the product benefits?

Concept development and testing to develop the marketing and engineering details of the target market which is what benefits the product provides how consumers will react to the product as the product produced at what cost will produce

test the concept by asking a sample of potential consumers what they think of the idea

Business Analysis roughly estimate the sales price to estimate the sales volume to estimate the benefits

Test Beta test market and produce a physical prototype testing the product for use in typical situations make adjustments where necessary to produce an initial run of the product and sell it in a test market to determine consumer acceptance

Technical Implementation of the new program initiation estimation writing the necessary resources planning requirements engineering operations department division of tasks necessary collaboration from suppliers publication of the resource plan and monitoring program review planning for possible contingencies

Marketing product launch advertising budget and the same design, distribution of advertisements and other promotional plan design for the product distribution of the critical path analysis is useful at this level

These steps must be repeated as many times as needed. Some steps can be eliminated. To reduce the processing time many companies make several at once (so-called concurrent engineering). To facilitate the successful introduction of products in the market and eliminate any weaknesses, the latest trends in interdepartmental meetings involving all the key areas responsible for the company will participate in product creation, purchasing, production, logistics, marketing commercial, customer service, etc.. With this, is to avoid inefficiencies in the product by small errors in approach can make it fail. For example, the packaging is too large to optimize the load, that there are problems of supply of certain components or that can not be guaranteed an appropriate repair time (continued)

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