It must be based on good marketing, market research (understand customers) and STP.
Developing products and later thinking about marketing is dangerous. Ex: New Coke, Coca
Cola's failure (lot of criticism); Segway not used as they thought it would be (failure)
Type of new products...
– breakthrough; new features, better performance, reduced cost
– incremental; improves an existing product, extension of an existing product
platform (Ipad → Ipad mini)
• Product Development Process:
Idea Generation → Development → Concept testing → Business analysis → Commercialize
→ Product management
Marketers role is to answer questions about:
– market size (is it a big enough market? Is it attractive?)
– STP
– customer requirements
– 4 P's
– how to get message across
and analyze with SWOT analysis and/or an Industry analysis with Porter's 5 forces and
competitors.
• Managing existing products:
– Strategic Business Units (SBU)
Large companies manage products through SBU's. Example: Nestle, baby food, cereal,
coffee, dairy... It represents different products, market, people...
Each SBU is managed like a separate company, with separate strategies, separate profit
targets, separate competitors and different target customers.
Part of a challenge for a company is to keep balance between SUBs: which one need more
attention? Which resource to allocate to a SBU?
– Portfolio Planning
about how you plan to manage a whole portfolio of products.
Managing your portfolio of SBU's or products.
1. BCG (Growth/Share Matrix)
It positions each SBU based on 4 categories.