Product Development Process
For a new product to be successful in the market one need to ensure that they have undergone the product development process. This will allow them to go through a series of stages that begin with ideation and ending with the introduction of the product in the market. These stages are aimed at understanding the consumers, markets, and competitors in order to ensure that the product will deliver superior value to the intended customers. The product development process is a cycle through which one should take their idea in order to convert it into a viable good or service. In our case, the idea of a new electronic product should also undergo the 8 steps of the product development process. These steps are idea generation, idea screening, concept development, and testing, marketing strategy development, business analysis, product development, test marketing, and commercialization (Gopalakrishnan, Libby, Samuels, & Swenson, 2015). This phased approach will ensure that we are able to keep our schedule, resources, and costs under control.
Idea generation is the first step and it involves the systematic search for product ideas. However, since we have already determined the product that we seek to launch and introduce into the market this step can be skipped. Having already decided on the electronic product that we intend to introduce in the market, we should spend too much time coming up with other ideas for comparison. Idea screening will also be omitted since the idea we have has already been picked and we only need to justify it to the target market. Idea screening involves the filtering of ideas in order to pick the one that we feel is good. Therefore, our product development process will begin with concept development and testing. Concept development is the creation of a detailed version of the new-product idea. A product...
Concept development will also involve the creation of images of the new product. A concept should be quite precise in order for it to be meaningful. This way the people reading about the concept will be able to understand and conceptualize the product being described. For the new electronic product, there should be at least three different concepts developed in order to pick the one that is most attractive to the customers. Concept testing involves presenting the concepts to target customers either physically or symbolically. This is aimed at determining if a particular concept has a strong customer appeal. Since it is not easy to present a physical electronic product we would make use of graphics to describe the product and present the different concepts for testing.
Having identified a promising concept for our electronic product. The next step will be developing the marketing strategy for the new product that is based on the selected concept. According to Golder and Mitra (2018) the marketing strategy will consist of a description of the target market, sales, market share, planned value proposition, and profit goals. We will also formulate the products planned price, its distribution, and marketing budget. Business analysis is the fifth stage and it involves the review of sales, costs, and projections of profit for the new product. This is done to establish whether these factors will meet the objectives that we have laid out. Sales estimation can be based on the sales history of similar products. With the forecast sales, it is easier to determine the expected costs and profits of the product. The other costs that can be estimated from the sales forecast are marketing, R&D, operations, and advertising costs. We can use all these costs to…
