Product Development & Customer Perception
When it comes to product development, product developers face the tough question of, how to incorporate the customer perception in their product
so to develop a product that the customers would buy and appreciate. This is really
a difficult task and thus demands careful analysis and assessment on
part of the product developers, considering that today I am going to provide a way to
overcome this challenge easily and effectively.
Before getting into the approach, let's first talk about why
do we need customer perception analysis, what benefits and advantages we will gain from such strategy.
Benefits and advantages of developing product based on customer perception
- Target market would buy and appreciate it (thus less failures)
- Tackles competitors and hence attain competitive advantage
- Company develops competitive expertise
- Cultivates a culture of market oriented approach than product oriented
These are some of the major benefits and advantages that
a company can achieve by keeping customer perception of product in their view.
Now let’s get to the process of incorporating customer
perception in your product.
Customer perception collection and incorporation in product
Step 1: Identify the products that would be your competitors
This step
is the first step in the processes and is very important one too, if you
correctly identify your competitors in terms of products you would be able to
produce a product that would tackle your competitors in effective manner. Otherwise you would end
up developing something that won’t make sense to your target market, neither
would it tackle competition. So it is very important to identify the right
products that you will be competing with.
Step 2: Identify the right target market
After right
identification of your competitors it is time to identify your target market,
which would be easy if you have carried out the first step in right manner. In
such case you would easily identify who are buying those products. And so those buyers/users are your future customers (target market).
Step 3: Develop questionnaires (that covers these identified products) for comparative analysis
After
identification of target market develop questionnaires that are comparative so
to understand and identify the reasons why certain customers prefer certain
products over others. What are the motivators and what they don’t appreciate or
prefer. Like the first step this step is extremely important, if you are unable
to develop right comparative questionnaires then it is more likely that you
might end up developing something that won’t grab the full target market
attention rather of sub segments of the target market so it is extremely
important that your comparison provides the exact analysis needed for
developing a product that would meet the overall demands of target market.
Step 4: Conduct the comparative survey
Assess your
target market opinion based on the questionnaires so to acquire the right data/product idea
for further work. Remember like many steps this step also demands care in terms
of conducting the questionnaires based survey from the right people means from
the identified target market. The higher the target market sample the better.
Step 5
In the data
collected you need to do the following steps to get the right data to work
further on it to develop a right product for the target market.
- Identify the leader
Identification of leader is really
important this will not only help you develop a product that can challenge the
market leader but also give you an insight about the product elements that has
given the leading position to one of your competitors.
- Identify what makes the leader
You have to identify from the data
collected the reasons that make the leader (from customer perspective). It is
obvious that a good number of customers would go for certain product, in other
words that is the market leader from customer point of view.
- Identify the second best and third best product
You can’t just take on the leader; you have
to move from one level to another so it is necessary that you identify the
second and third best product.
- Identify what makes the second best and third best product
To move from one level to another you have to
identify what are the reasons (target market opinions/judgments etc) that makes
these products second and third most favorable products in the target market.
Remember utmost care and seriousness is needed in all these steps, a minor
error on this stage can lead to unfathomable consequences.
Step 6: Collected data dissemination
Share the collected data with all the relevant departments, this
figure by no means is the complete recommendation rather it provides a
mechanism through which you can disseminate the collected data. Like sharing it
with HR department to hire or outsource the right human resource, with R&D
to get the right product, with marketing department to get the right marketing strategy, with stakeholders to get their trust and funding and with finance
department to allocate funds so on and so forth.
You may also like to read some interesting posts on Super Product, Super strategy and strategy on developing a product emotional aspect.
TAGS Competitive Advantage Competitors Customer Satisfaction Customers/Consumers Marketing Organization Product R&D Strategies
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