A lot of people have been asking what product creation is all about
In this post I will be elaborate about it.
Let me begin with a brief overview of the marketing process in order to have a clear understanding of marketing and its relationship with product creation/development and management. In a nut shell, marketing practice is built upon the following steps
- Research Making to find out the needs and wants of the customers.
- Market segmentation, targeting and positioning.
- Developing the marketing mix program that consists of taking decision on product, price, place (distribution), and promotion.
- Implementation of the marketing plan and program.
- Control and evaluation of the marketing programme
The above process is what is usually referred to as the marketing management process which adopts the marketing concept philosophy. ‘’ What to Produce, How to Produce and for whom to Produce’’. This is built on the motives of finding out the needs of the customers before building the products to satisfy the identified needs and desire. This goes to show that products are built to solve any identified customers’ problems.
WHAT THEN IS A PRODUCT?
Product is one of the four elements of the marketing mix; the other three being price, place and promotion, which are all geared towards serving and satisfying the target market. A product is the basic element for marketing. The word “Product” has several meanings, but it is generally a bundle of satisfaction that customers purchase or patronize in order to solve a problem. When we talk about a product, we talk about solutions to problems. Hence, any product that fails to provide the needed solution to customers is not a good product.
It is important to note that in marketing, the concept of product covers goods, services, people, ideas, places and organizations, except state otherwise.
PRODUCT CREATION/DEVELOPMENT
Product Creation/Development is a complete process of creating and bringing a new product to market. Product creation is the process of exploiting market opportunity by turning it into a product or service available for sale. You are not a good project creator, if you don’t have your customers at heart while creating your products. The uniqueness of a product depends on what the customer or target market consider as new. In view of this, a new product can be an invention (entirely new which does not exist before), innovation (new to the company but existing in the industry), or product modification (changing the package, size, design). There are eight steps involved in product creation
- Idea generation
- Idea screening
- Concept development and testing (Prototype)
- Business analysis
- Marketing strategy development
- Product creation
- Testing market
- Commercialization
PRODUCT ADOPTION PROCESS
- Awareness
- Information search
- Evaluation
- Trial
- Adoption
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE AND ITS STAGES
- Introduction stage
- Growth stage
- Maturity stage
- Decline stage
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Without missing words and or using ambiguous words, I will say product management is all about conceiving, developing, maintaining and controlling the product sustainability over its life cycle. It deals with deciding on what the products will be; thus, ensuring it to remain like that in the market profitability. At this point most product managers makes mistakes by focusing on the market value and thus drift their attention from customers satisfaction which is the primary goal of the said product.
