teachthe4ps.com - teaching the 4 ps

Customer ratings and reviews are not only useful to other customers — marketers can use this information to improve products.  Of course some customers are more vocal — and some products solicit more comments — than others.  Would people care about sink mats?  Like the author of “Rubbermaid Proves the Value of Listening to Customers,” (The 1to1 Blog) I was surprised to see that customers writing reviews.  In my previous life I worked in sales and marketing with Eastman Kodak.  I also saw the power of customer comments when one of my fellow sales reps tape recorded interviews with fine art photographers about what they liked and didn’t like about black-and-white photo papers.  When the R&D folks who engineered and manufactured the paper heard these interviews it had a huge impact — and better products soon followed.  The potential for this form of low-cost market research to influence new-product development, product quality, and various other elements of the marketing mix is tremendous.

Last month I connected you with an article about about “Subway’s $5 Footlong.”  These days value sells in the quick serve restaurant industry.  So Quiznos, which had tried to stay a bit more upscale than Subway, responded with a value campaign and its torpedo sandwiches.  Quiznos has had success and you can read about it in this recent article on BusinessWeek’s site, “Damn! Torpedoes Get Quiznos Back on Track” (January 14, 2010)

This BusinessWeek article “IBM May Not Be the Patent King After All” (January 13, 2010) and related slide show “The World’s 25 Most Inventive Companies” reports…

… a study conducted for Bloomberg BusinessWeek by Ocean Tomo, a Chicago intellectual property consulting firm, concludes that IBM’s collection of U.S. patents over the past five years ranks only eighth in value. No. 1 is Microsoft, which ranked third, with 2,906 patents issued last year.

While this list did not contain any surprises, the order was different than I expected.  Of course the methodology used to make such lists is key.

New products are important, but in these hard times many firms have cut new product development budgets.  Now many firms are learning jugaad - and Indian approach to new product development that focuses on innovation at low costs.  See “India’s Next Global Export: Innovation“” (BusinessWeek, December 2, 2009).  This might help with discussions of NPD or in control and cost management.

This article in the Wall Street Journal “The Path to Developing Successful New Products” (subscription required – or do an online search on the title to get back-door access to the article) reports on recent research on success factors in new product development. Also includes links to some articles in the Sloan Management Review.  Some highlights…

We found—after surveying more than 300 employees at 28 companies across North America and Europe—that the businesses with the best product-development track records do three things better than their less-successful peers: They create a clear sense of project goals early on, they nurture a strong project culture in their workplace, and they maintain close contact with customers throughout a project’s duration.

Here’s another technology product that’s moving quickly from the market introduction to the market growth stage of the product life cycle.  The first Kindle (Amazon’s popular e-book reader) was released on November 19, 2007.  Until I read this article (“Attack of the Kindle Killers:  The Boom in New E-Readers,” Time, October 11, 2009), I did not know there were so many competing e-readers – either on the market or due out shortly.  The article includes a slide show with nine different readers.  Only the Kindle and Sony seem to get significant publicity, but that may change if one of these other readers catches on.  Might be fun to show the slide show to class and ask students to develop a marketing strategy for one of the less well-known readers.