Creating Competitive Advantages Through New Product Development
The transformation of many diverse forms of customer, supplier, internal development, and research & development (R&D) insights into a consistent and productive platform for product development is key to long-term competitive growth. The reliance on advanced frameworks for organizing these diverse sources of innovation into taxonomies that can eventually be used to fuel new products is often called the New Product Development (NPD) process. As every company has a unique, highly differentiated and often highly customized business model, the same holds true for the NPD process. Companies over time define the NPD process to align with their unique technological and market strengths. Comparing the NPD process at Salesforce, the leading provider of SaaS-based CRM software versus Apple makes this point clearly. Salesforce is known for very rapid product releases of the CRM applications and exceptionally quick updates. Conversely, Apple is known for being slow and deliberate in their user experience design criterion and extremely secretive about their NPD process. Both companies are market leaders in their fields, one in a digital product and the other, in a physical product. As is the case with any 21rst century product, both have electronics and software heavily embedded within each of them. The digital product, which is Salesforces' CRM application, has a much more accelerated product development and testing cycle associated with it, as the company is aggressively pursuing market share against large, entrenched rivals. Conversely, Apple on the hardware side of businesses is often creating their own new markets through efficient use of intellectual capital and innovative, user experience-based designs. Both companies are market leaders in large part due to the success of their continual execution of their NPD processes and strategies.
Research Paper
Undergraduate
Marketing strategy concepts and implementation
MARKETING STRATEGY new product development marketing strategy will help grow the market and, at the same time, the company's market share, while winning over both individuals new customers and customers from other…
Week 6 study materials and topics
This paper contains two separate marketing case studies. The first concerns that of Maria, former sole proprietor of Tornado Tacos, who is now part of the product development department of the major food company Manchester Foods. The second case study concerns that of Heather, a manager who must persuade company leaders of the need for more sales reps in her department at Wellness Foods.