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Summary
Many new products fail within a few months or years of their launch. This essay will outline the key stages involved in the new product development process. There will be discussions of the reasons why such failures take place with the use of examples to support all discussions. Amongst some examples used will be of an experience that a close friend encountered but due to privacy reasons, I will use an alias name, ????
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A product is “anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use or consumption that might satisfy a want or need” (Kotler, 2009 pg 607). A product can be purchased from an organisation or through the process of development. Product developments are ways in which a company can either improve their existing product or innovate it to ensure growth and profitability in business and to keep up with competitors. The success and failure of a product is determined by what is being sold to whom, the stages taken to develop the product and very importantly, how it is presented to consumer and promoted to gain market acceptance.
A product can be both tangible and intangible and can take many forms such as physical objects, services or a person. The outcome to all this is that of consumer purchase. This brings us to the discussion of the stages of product development. Kotlers text outlines that there are 8 stages of product development. These are
Idea generation
This is the first stage where Organisations think about what sorts of product they can get out to the current market. This is done by brain-storming as many ideas as possible that the organisation can come up with. Kotlers text states that ideas can come from internal sources who are employees of the organisation and from external sources such as the consumers, suppliers, distributors and the competitors.
As stated in the Journal article by Stasch (1992) “the logical starting point in thinking about new products is the generation...