Cascade Designs Makes New Hires In Product Development And Marketing

Kalon Pilmanis will serve as senior director, product; Jeff Moberg will work as a product line manager; and Ashley Brown will assume the role of senior … Read source

Product development is the main phase of the new product planning. Here a manufacturer gathers all the information and ideas on the new product and uses this data to create an actual tangible product. This activity also includes creating new project team and creating project management infrastructure.

It is important to remember, that the main aim of the product development phase is to create the product, which can be sold to external customers.

Market research

The marketing strategy of a commercial entity can be thoroughly evaluated using market research. Market research is necessary for identifying a market and understanding it better in order to be able to propose a proper solution to this problem. When company’s marketers want to introduce a new product, they first evaluate the potential of the market for this product, competition, potential customers and their needs, competitors’ actions and so forth. Then they perform primary research (questionnaires) or secondary research (hypothesis about market condition presented by other authors as facts).

Product development cycle

The product development cycle is another important phase of new product planning. The product development cycle comprises all actions taken by an organization to create a final product. The process starts with anticipating customer needs and expectations, creating concept for this product, developing this concept into a tangible merchandise, testing the developed product and ending up with the launch of the final product on the market.

Process analysis

A survey of all manufacturing tasks for producing a final product from raw materials to completion of the whole process. The benefit of process analysis is that it can help to eliminate unnecessary steps in production and at the same time to improve the work organization and efficiency of employees. Therefore, process analysis can reduce manufacturing costs.

Product portfolio expansion strategy

The idea of product portfolio expansion strategy is to extend a company’s existing products range by creating new items. For successful expansion it is necessary to carefully examine a company’s capacities and potentials as well as analyze potential competitors’ activities. There are several different ways of product portfolio expansion strategy. Some firms increase price for existing products, develop new products with higher quality but at the same price or even lower price then existing products and etc. However, one should remember, that any kind of expansion strategy has its own disadvantages in addition to all their advantages such as legal issues, unplanned expenses, absence of marketing strategies for new products or even complete retail rejection of new products after they have been released.