Developing, Testing, and Launching New Products and Services

"An extremely important responsibility of the marketing group is to help the company identify new market needs and opportunities and respond to them with appropriate and effective product solutions"

Is this still the responsibility of the marketing group ? Or have companies introduced specific new product/services teams and departments ? Does this function come under commercial for example ?

Wherever the responsiblity lies, I think we all agree it is a critical function of any company if they are to survive and thrive.

With new technologies, we are all probably buying into new products and services at a much faster rate than when Kotler first wrote this sentence - but it is still true today.

Kotler uses some research to state how New Product/Service Development can be managed by companies - he gives an example of the various stages companies can go through;

• Idea Generation
• Idea Screening
• Concept Development & Testing
• Marketing Strategy Development
• Business Analysis
• Product Development
• Market Testing
• Commercialization
• The Consumer-Adoption Process

Not all ideas will pass to the next stage - so, comapnies must have a mechanism to generate enough 'Ideas' for the process to start and for the system to generate enough ideas to achieve the business objectives.

All companies, to be successful need to manage a process that works for them - this chapter is a good start point for any company. The challenge is to establish a system that is as effective as possible to help the company grow/replace products/services that reach the end of their life-cycle.

This is another chapter with relevance to today's marketers.