Question

how can marketers contribute to the creation & development of a new product? How do consumers play a role in the development process?

Answer 1

The role and importance of marketers have to be as important as that of developers during the product development process.

Some of the major roles played by marketers in new product development process are as follows:

1. Marketing should work with R&D to establish clear, mutually agreed project priorities to reduce chances of pet projects. Left alone, technical people will have plenty of fanciful ideas to pursue and marketers will have plenty of esoteric customer needs they would like to serve. Product development teams have to come up with solutions to customers’ needs which can be sold profitably.
2. The company should improve the provision of marketing information to R&D. Marketing must give R&D people timely and quality information.

   Marketers should be very prompt in informing R&D of any change in customer needs that might have occurred, since they last gave them the required information. It is the responsibility of the marketing department to ensure that customers’ latest needs are incorporated in the new product.

   Marketing research team must include members of the R&D team so that their doubts can be clarified. There would be nothing like product developers themselves researching customer needs.

   As a developer listens to customer requirements, he is able to play the possible solution in his mind and seeks clarification from customers regarding its suitability. The iteration will go on in the developer’s mind till he figures out the right solution.

3. Members of the R&D team should become more customer centric and understand that the products developed by them must ultimately be accepted by the target customers of the company.

   The marketing department in the organization should undertake the responsibility of passing customer related information to the R&D team, and ensure that the R&D team interacts with customers as often as possible by participating in customer visits and trade shows.

   R&D people can find it irritating to incorporate customers’ requirements in every idea they conceive. Customers’ requirements constrain creativity of developers and they may start considering them an intrusion in their pursuit of the next big idea.

   R&D people have to be brought in touch with customers and their genuine needs to make them empathize with their needs. When developers have empathy for customers’ needs, they are likely to produce designs that are true to the customers’ needs.

4. There are important personality and value differences between R&D and marketing. The most important difference is that while marketers are fixated on customer requirements, developers sometimes want to pursue ideas which interest them. It is important for marketing to develop an informal relationship with R&D department.

   At any one time, a developer is playing around with many ideas. A marketer should be in such a relationship with a developer, that he feels comfortable sharing these ideas, some of which he himself might consider too ambitious. The marketer can quickly gauge if some of the ideas incubating in the developer’s mind can be helpful in serving some customer needs.

5. It is important that marketers get over their technology phobia and learn more about technology. Familiarity with technology makes communication between the marketing and the R&D department more effective, as marketers can understand the means by which the product design can create competitive advantages.

   They can also comprehend the limitations of technology in terms of developing new products, as product designs often involve trade-offs to be made. Technology savvy marketers would that some customer requirements cannot be met however legitimate or urgent they may be, because the required technology is not available or it would be prohibitively expensive to serve them.

Newly introduced products and services are failed after a couple of years due to several reasons including the ignorance of consumers.

Some of the roles of consumers in product innovation include:

1. Insight Provider: Consumer’s role as the “insight provider” is often characterized by the direct consumer influence as well as autonomy in the process of product innovation. Community of consumers can be sourced by companies to help in the process of finding solutions, providing insights, identifying needs or evaluating ideas.
2. Customizer: Consumers can directly influence the final stage of the product development through adapting and selecting a predetermined set of product features as per their own preferences up to the extent to which firms’ value chain support it.
3. Ideator: Consumers can play an active role in various innovation practices through creating effective inputs and innovative products ideas. However, the results obtained by firms through collectively efforts of consumers will finally become the intellectual property of the firm and will be used as inspiration for innovation.
4. Co-Creator: Consumer’s role as the “co-creator” involves the open innovation through collaboration of consumers in an online community with the firm for the utilization of their skills and knowledge to develop a new product. Co-creation often involves all phases of innovation process such as idea generation, design & engineering, testing as well as launching phase of the product.
5. Creator: Innovation can also be initiated and driven by the consumers themselves. In such a situation; consumers often act as involved and independent value creators. Such professional innovative ideas generated through community members can strongly influence the rate and direction of innovations in certain industries.
6. Business Analyst: Consumer’s role in the estimation of the likely selling price of the new product on the basis of competitive products and their own preferences is likely to affect the success of the new product in the competitive market.
7. User: Consumer’s role as a “user” of a newly developed product can provide opportunity to test new product and its prototype. Consumer’s involvement in product testing can help a firm in determining the product flaws quite early in the developmental cycle.