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Creating products that sell themselves in a downturn

As a marketing professional one of your major responsibilities is to apply your skills in customer market research as a means of identifying the value space where R&D invests its resources. Product portfolio decisions that are taken independently of customer research or are based on financial analysts guesses are, quite simply, more likely to fail as they fall short of fulfilling customer needs.

You may already have a customer relationship management system in place; you may even conduct regular focus groups or elicit more casual feedback from customers through trade shows or key account meetings. But to uncover the formula for creating winning product developments you have to answer the following, deceptively simple questions:

• What drives your potential customers crazy?
  
• What irritates them? Both for existing products and their wider work or personal lives.
  
• What problems do they have to which your product has the answer?

Answering these will fundamentally change the type of research you conduct that will change the way you talk to customers and drive the development of products that they will want to buy.

Delivering a customer value based portfolio approach to product development requires that you engage at the earliest possible stages of product development. Your research will need to be open ended, interview focussed, ethnographic (observational), quantifiable and rigorous.

To develop successful products in a recession you need to understand your actual or prospective customers at such a deep level that you know, before any development begins, the products and services that they will value.

Many of you will already have products in the market and that enables you to take advantage of real customer experience with your products or services. Our most successful clients, survey customers 6 months to a year after products are introduced and thereby gain feedback that helps in two ways:-

1. Function, feature and design feedback together with competitive comparisons and likes / dislikes provides valuable feedback for engineers to GET IT RIGHT with the next generation of product
   
   
2. Benefits, weaknesses and application feedback enables marketing to identify USPs, the characteristics of adopter markets and provides valuable feedback to introduce more effective product launches and communication campaigns
   

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