How to design a new product?

When a company is designing a new product, it has to go through eight phases which will help it launch a successful product. In order to launch a product, the firm must know its customers, and deliver superior value to customers.

The first point is the idea generation. Before finding the right idea, the company has to go through lots of ideas. These are internal idea sources, when they come from the employees of the company, external, when they come from distributors, suppliers or another company, and ideas can be crowdsource, when it comes from the customer itself. In crowdsourcing, the more people are involved, the better the project.

After that you must be able to visualize all your ideas in order to reduce the amount. At this point, marketers have to write a summary about the idea. This write-up describes the product, the customer value proposition, the target market, and the competition. In this document, you also find estimation of market size, product price, development time and costs, manufacturing costs and rate of return. This goes in front of a committee who will assess the RWW. The real- win- worth doing. Is the value real, what will the company be able to sustain the product, and does the product shows enough potential. The idea that answers yes to these questions have more chances to be received.

Then the firm must work on the idea and develop a product concept which will be a detailed version of the product. Here the concept should be able to define every aspect of the product and propose multiple versions of it which will be soon tested to see if their reliability on the market is verified. Groups of target customers are chosen and will give their first impression of the concept.

During the next phase, which is the marketing strategy development, will design a simple marketing strategy for the product which will introduce it to the market. All this is described in the marketing strategy statement.

Once the product marketing statement has been ratified, the business analysis can be conducted. During the business analysis every financial aspect is being forecasted in order to find out if the product is valid.

During the product development, the investments are being made, and the product will soon be developed by the R&D teams. This will create a first prototype. As a matter of fact, tests a conducted to be sure that the product remains viable to the consumers.

After this phase comes the test marketing phase, when the whole product is test, from the starting point to the whole marketing process. This can take years before a company is definitely sure about the new product it is launching.

Finally, at the commercialization phase, the company decides on the timing to when to launch the new product. The company will face high cost so the product must be launched at time, depending on competitors, suppliers, distributors.