Using the same organization selected " Euro Car ", complete the following tasks:
- Assess the types of stakeholders involved in the development process for the product/service of your chosen company.
- Evaluate the impact of key inputs from stakeholder groups on new product/service development efforts.
- Analyze the role these key stakeholder groups can play in contributing to the success of a new product/service.
- Justify at least two persuasive strategies that can be used to engage stakeholders in new product/service development projects.
- Assess the key competitive advantages that utilizing the current trends in information technology (IT) will deliver to the area of new product/service development.
Submission Details:
- Submit your answers in a 3- to 4-page Microsoft Word document, using APA style.
Managing Products.html
Managing Products
The product life cycle is one of the most powerful tools available to marketing managers. Every product category goes through five stages—development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline—and the product strategy changes with each stage.
Development: This stage marks the development of an idea into a product. During this stage, sales are zero and the company costs keep building up.
Introduction: The product is introduced in the market, and the focus is on increasing sales. The heavy expenses at this stage rarely result in profits.
Growth: During this stage, the product sees growing market acceptance and profits.
Maturity: The product is accepted by most of its potential buyers and faces rising competition in the market. The sales growth begins to slow down, along with the leveling off or decline of profits.
Decline: This is the stage when the product is said to be "dying" and its sales start to decline.
It has been said that the concept of the product life cycle is today at about the stage that the Copernican view of the universe was 300 years ago: a lot of people knew about it, but hardly anybody seemed to use it in any effective or productive way.
Read a Harvard Business Review article on the the product life cycle
Additional Materials
View the PDF transcript for Managing Products
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Product Life Cycle
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Product Life Cycle: An Example JELL-O® is an established brand with a number of products under its brand name. It was the first product thatheralded the gelatin product category in 1845. This brand was developed and established over a long period. Development In 1845, the first patent for the gelatin desert was obtained by Peter Cooper, an industrialist and a philanthropist. In 1897, Pearl B. Wait bought the patent and created a fruit-flavored version of Cooper’s gelatin and named it JELL-O®. Four flavors were created—orange, lemon, raspberry, and strawberry. Introduction In 1899, Wait sold the brand to Woodward's Genesee Pure Food Company. In 1902, Woodward's Genesee Pure Food Company introduced JELL-O® as “America's Most Famous Dessert" through an advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal. Over the decades, more flavors were introduced. In 1904, the first trademark of the brand, JELL-O Girl, made its appearance. Growth In 1989, Kraft Foods took over the brand. The company strengthened the brand by introducing new attributes and benefits and creating new beliefs and values. The company invited celebrities to endorse the brand. This resulted in a tremendous leap in sales, with the brand being recognized nationally and internationally. Maturity
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In 2001, JELL-O® was declared the official snack of Utah by the Utah Senate. Today, more than 158 products are sold under the brand name, with about 300 million boxes sold annually in the United States. Epilogue Through astute product development and marketing, JELL-O® has remained a strong product for over acentury and has yet to experience a decline.
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New Product Development.html
New Product Development
An organization may choose to introduce a new product in response to a competitor's threat to introduce a similar product. The new product development process has seven steps.
Idea generation: In this step, the emphasis is on coming up with as many product ideas as possible.
Screening of ideas: The ideas that seem to have the highest potential are selected from the pool of ideas created in the first step.
Product concept testing: The ideas shortlisted in the second step are put before a focus group comprising customers, distributors, and employees.
Business analysis: The process of evaluation becomes more research based in its effort to measure the viability of the one or two ideas that have survived the rigor of the previous steps.
Product and marketing mix development: The organization directs its attention to the development of a prototype or a preliminary design of the selected product idea and a marketing plan for it.
Market testing: The product is marketed as a prototype and introduced in a small city by a town representative of the target market.
Commercialization: The organization introduces the product in a wide market, often by scheduling the arrival of the product in waves, which means that the entire market is not targeted at once.
New product development is a task taken by the company to introduce newer products in the market. On a regular basis, there will be a need in the business for new product development. Your existing products may be technologically outdated; you have different segments to target or you want to cannibalize an existing product. In such cases, New product development is the answer for the company.
Additional Materials
media/transcripts/SUO_MBA6011 W4 L2.pdf
New Product Development
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Strategic Marketing
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2 New Product Development
MBA6011 Week 4 Lecture 2
An organization may choose to introduce a new product in response to a competitor's threat to introduce a similar product. The new product development process has seven steps.
1. Idea generation: In this step, the emphasis is on coming up with as many product ideas as possible. This can be an ongoing process, in which you borrow inputs from people both inside and outside the organization. Contributions may be sought from consumers through the formation of focus groups and the creation of feedback mechanisms. The focus group includes channel members and the sales team. You may also use secondary data sources, such as websites and brainstorming sessions within the organization.
2. Screening of ideas: The ideas that seem to have the highest potential are selected from the pool of ideas created in the first step. The evaluation process is usually quite lengthy, with each idea going through several rounds. Advanced research techniques are used during the advanced stages of evaluation, leading to the selection of a few ideas that show promising estimates in terms of profitability, cost of production, sales, and competitiveness.
3. Product concept testing: The ideas shortlisted in the second step are put before a focus group comprising customers, distributors, and employees. The ideas are usually presented in the form of concept board presentations or small advertisements about the product. The initial feedback gives marketers information regarding the likability of and the level of interest in the product, the frequency of purchase, and price points.
4. Business analysis: The process of evaluation becomes more research based in its effort to measure the viability of
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the one or two ideas that have survived the rigor of the previous steps. Internal discussions, secondary research, customer surveys, and competitors' analyses are some of the tools used to carry out internal and external research. The aim is to obtain proper business and financial forecasts and judge whether the product concept aligns well with the essential purpose and strategy of the organization.
5. Product and marketing mix development: The organization directs its attention to the development of a prototype or a preliminary design of the selected product idea and a marketing plan for it. Both are tested by samples of target customers. The feedback may be used to tweak various elements before seeking inputs again. The information gathered can be used to gauge customers' understanding of the product and opinion on purchase rates and the feasibility of large-scale production.
6. Market testing: The product is marketed as a prototype and introduced in a small city by a town representative of the target market. In more controlled test settings, distributors are paid a fee by the company. Some other approaches include creating a "laboratory" store, that is, a temporary brick-and- mortar setup, where customers are recruited to shop in virtual reality environments in which shops are replicated. The purpose in each case is to measure the level of interest in the product on the basis of the customers' response by buying the product.
7. Commercialization: The organization introduces the product in a wide market, often by scheduling the arrival of the product in waves, which means that the entire market is not targeted at once. The difference in the arrival schedules of the product in various markets gives the organization more control over its
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production process, allowing it to fine-tune the product according to the requirements of different markets.
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The Product in an Organization.html
The Product in an Organization
A marketing mix is a set of controllable tactical marketing activities—product, promotion, place, and price—that an organization blends to produce the response it wants from the target market. The first element of concern in a marketing mix strategy is the product; the place in the order is no coincidence. Without having the right product for your target market, it would make no business sense for you to spend time and effort on the rest of the elements of the marketing mix. In the end, it is the quality of a product or a service and its benefits to the target market that attract customers and keep them coming back for more.
A product strategy is a response to the marketing objective formulated after performing a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and trends (SWOTT) analysis and a market growth strategy analysis. Regardless of whether the organization pursues a new product growth strategy or an existing one, tactical decisions need to be made. It is the choice of a market growth strategy that decides whether an organization will develop a new product or modify an existing one.
A product roadmap is an outline of upcoming for a specific timeframe. The roadmap details the overall implementation of the product strategy. What’s included in a product roadmap?
- Themes
- Timeframes of releases
- Descriptions of features that are being built
- The problems the features will solve
The product roadmap aligns your company’s product vision with the product’s external stakeholders. Stakeholders are people with an active interest in your company or product, including investors, prospects, customers, internal teams and boards of directors.
A product roadmap answers the following questions:
- What are you going to do next?
- What are your products’ future capabilities?
- What problems are you going to solve?
- What features will be available in the next release?
Goals of product roadmaps
Vision- Without vision, releases will seem random and will lack connection to a broader picture. A product roadmap provides stakeholders with that vision, which is a big picture of what you are trying to achieve. It also helps your stakeholders to understand your direction as it relates to their own.
Product strategy – A product roadmap provides the particulars on executing the product strategy. While your product strategy outlines who you are selling to and what problems you will solve for them, the product roadmap explains how you will do it. The roadmap sets out the plan for upcoming releases, and what features each one will include. Because it is specific, it tangibly aligns your organization to the product strategy.
Big Picture Context – The product roadmap provides a big picture context of the features. It provides the background of each feature and how it relates to larger goals. Without context, it can seem like you are building without purpose.
The roadmap also details when certain features will be built, and in what order. For example, if you are building a customer management tool with a “contact import” feature, it would be important for the larger theme of “working with other tools.” By itself, it doesn’t have as much impact.
The product roadmap allows people to see the larger picture of where you are headed with a small feature. If stakeholders (internal or external) cannot see which direction you are going, they might not believe that you will reach your goals.
Additional Materials
View the PDF transcript for The Product in an Organization
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The Product in an Organization
© 2016 South University
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Strategic Marketing
©2016 South University
2 The Product in an Organization
MBA6011 Week 4 Lecture 1
A marketing mix is a set of controllable tactical marketing activities—product, promotion, place, and price—that an organization blends to produce the response it wants from the target market. The first element of concern in a marketing mix strategy is the product; the place in the order is no coincidence. Without having the right product for your target market, it would make no business sense for you to spend time and effort on the rest of the elements of the marketing mix. In the end, it is the quality of a product or a service and its benefits to the target market that attract customers and keep them coming back for more.
A product strategy is a response to the marketing objective formulated after performing a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and trends (SWOTT) analysis and a market growth strategy analysis. Regardless of whether the organization pursues a new product growth strategy or an existing one, tactical decisions need to be made concerning the following key issues:
Experts from the beverage industry signal that consumer preferences are shifting toward more fruity flavors. This trend is part of the much larger health and wellness movement, which has already hit the food industry. Encouraged by the trend, a leading beverage producer, Nature Drink, thinks it is time to experiment with a new product—a milk-based beverage with a tropical taste. Although the product can be used by people of all age groups, Nature Drink is specifically targeting the adult, health-conscious demographic. NatureDrink wants to position its product such that it reflects the healthy, energetic, and chic lifestyle of its target group.
Features and Design
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A product must first and foremost satisfy the basic expectations of the consumer segments it caters to. A company conducts surveys to identify the needs and expectations of its customers and then decide which specific features can add value to the product at the best cost to the company. Besides flavor, what are some of the features that Nature Drink can offer in its new beverage? Keep in mind its main target group. How Nature Drink takes care of the features and design of its new product: The new product aims at promoting a healthier lifestyle among the target group. Therefore, it offers numerous health features such as low fat content, high calcium and mineral content, and an optimal amount of antioxidants (known to slow down the process of aging).The product is designed to maintain its taste as close as possible to the natural flavors of tropical fruits. The color is also kept in natural shades of the fruits, adding to the allure of the product.
Variety and Quality Variation should not be so great as to cause the product to deviate from the product category. Moreover, customers do prefer choices but too many options can often confuse them. What kind of variation and how much of variety are questions that need to be addressed here. The product must not only meet the high quality level defined for it but also provide a consistent level of performance. Should Nature Drink offer its customers variety in its new beverage? What would be some of the quality levels for the new beverage? How Nature Drink takes care of the variety and quality of its new product: Customers definitely like to have some choice of flavor in a beverage. Nature Drink has launched its new drink in four natural flavors—blueberry, pomegranate, mango, and mixed berry. The quality of the drink is maintained using minimum preservatives.
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Branding, Packaging, and Labeling Successful branding leaves a lasting positive impression on the minds of buyers and creates loyalty toward the brand. It is important that all packaging decisions are in line with the essential positioning and marketing strategy established for the product. How can Nature Drink display, package, and label its new beverage? What can it do to maintain its brand identity on the packages? How Nature Drink is branding, packaging, and labeling its product: The new drink is packaged in lightweight, recyclable plastic bottles designed in exotic shapes and colors adding an element of liveliness. Although the packages of different flavors are identifiable by their characteristic colors, the green and white colors of the Nature Drink brand are maintained as the main background colors. In addition, an easy-to-grip, twist-off top provides a hassle- free opening experience. Moreover, a catchy slogan—Drink healthy for a healthy lifestyle—is added on the label. Support Services Support services need to be designed keeping in mind the needs of customers. The organization will need to conduct appropriate surveys to identify the requirements of its target market, assess the cost involved, and develop a package that will please customers and be profitable to the organization. Can you think of any support services that Nature Drink can offer to its customers? What support services Nature Drink provides to its customers: Nature Drink provides tips on a healthy lifestyle through its “Healthy Living” campaign. Using a panel of eminent doctors and nutritionists, the campaign aims at creating health awareness among its customers.
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This helps position Nature Drink as a company that cares for the health and wellness of its customers.