Joan and Julie also talked about timing. Timing is one factor that affect a product. When market is ready, no matter how good is your product, it will not gain a big market share. For example, if someone launched iWatch twenty years ago, I do not think people want to buy it. The product is too advanced for them. People do not need it back in that time. Compare to now, we need that kind of product and people are familiar to use electronic advices. People have desire for those product, so iWatch has a much larger market now.
To connect with what Joan and Julie said in the interview, here are some points and concepts that are similar to what we have learned. In the first lecture, we learned common reasons of new products failures. One of them
In this stage there are rules concerning how long the product can be marketed as new. After the initial introduction time the marketing strategy could and should change in order to have the product seen by as many potential clients as possible. Once an item is accepted word of mouth advertising can be just as helpful as the continued mass media marketing strategies already in use. There have been a number of products that when introduced to the market immediately began to be accepted. A few simple toys such as the Furbies and Tickle-me-Elmo had their moment is the spotlight when introduced prior to Christmas and for some reason flew from the shelves faster than retailers could get them. This type of acceptance into the market would be great for any product as long as the demand was constant. Like the toys, many of today’s technological gadgets are sought after and with the mention of a new upgraded version of the phone, tablet, laptop, or other electronic toy drives people to preorder and wait in line for the date of the items release to the market. This is the acceptance that every developing company would love to have. With the acceptance of their product they will be able to quickly recover the money spent on research and development and product validation. Despite being the next latest
Having a large market share can be very helpful because companies earn more money to produce more. They also create brand loyalties even if they increase their prices. However, companies who have large market shares often times do not provide a lot of innovation. These companies usually feel they don’t need to get ahead because they hold such a big share in the market. This sometimes hurts their brand because when new products enter the market with cool features, consumer are likely to be engaged and
More new products need to be introduced and research needs to be done to find out which products will be most popular and profitable.
“The product life cycle is concerned with the sales history of a product or product class.” (Mullins & Walker, 2013, pg. 271) Beats by Dr. Dre’s mission is to be the leading producer of headphone and portable speaker systems and since their inception they have been climbing the ladder taking market share from competitors link Samsung and Sony. The current industry climate consists of many big brand names competing for a piece of the pie. All of these big brand names have a unique selling proposition and key features but none have differentiated themselves the way Beats by Dre has. The headphones have become an industry standard and they are an item coveted by the masses, creating an opening for Beats by Dre to introduce The Pill.
Market share is a major pointer of market competitiveness. This implies to how well a business is doing beyond its competitors. This metric, enhanced by alterations in sales revenue, enables managers to assess both selective and primary demand in their market. This means that it assists them to evaluate not only entire market growth or decrease but also trends in consumers’ selections against competitors. In general, sales growth gotten from primary demand is not as costly and more profitable compared to that attained by seizing share from competitors. On the other hand, losses from market share can indicate dire long-term problems that necessitate tactical adjustments. Businesses with market shares lower than certain heights may not be practical. Similarly, inside a business’ product line, market share inclinations for certain products are seen as early signals of prospective opportunities of problems (Brelsford, 2014).
When analyzing the Apple industry on of the main tools that was used was the five forces analysis. The first force looked at was the barrier to entry, in which capital, brand loyalty and economies of scale were the main components. In an industry where technology plays such a major role capital is a must in order to stay innovative and ahead of the competition in the research and development department. Capital is also needed because there are so many major names in the music player industry already that a major advertising campaign as well as some type of niche in the market to set you apart would be needed. When it comes to brand loyalty, companies like Apple, Dell, Creative Labs, iRiver, RCA and SanDisk already play a major role by producing music players that are reliable and cost efficient depending on the technology that you are looking for in a music player. Economies of scale would play a major role in deciding whether or not to enter the music player market because Apple controls 60 percent of the music player market in which only 11 percent of the population owns a player. This would make one believe that since Apple owns such a major percentage of the market that they have sold enough of their products that economies of scale doesn't really pertain to them. In order for you to get to the point where you can sell your product at low enough prices to compete you would have to sale a large amount and with only 40 percent of the market open to smaller less technological companies this would be a difficult task.
Today’s products in the market targets necessities of tomorrow’s market. The product which is performing low today may become competitor tomorrow. This will occur when technology development is in much faster pace than what a customer is expecting. If the performance or value proposition offered by competitors has improved throughout the years the choice will be positive to product which is reliable. The companies which monitors and back tracks the needs, usage and trends of their mainstream consumers will catch the success changing the aspects of being along with competitors in the market.
The target and positioning strategies of Apple are different as well because most of its strategies are related to cult branding. A cult brand has committed users that want to be a part of the unique brand (Acosta and Asagayam, 2010, p. 165 ) because the brand creates an exclusive image from scratch. To create this appeal, Apple invests a great amount of money into its branding so that customers have the connection with this brand only. Moreover, the positioning is done in such a way that Apple customers prefer form over functioning. The type of products Apple has introduced in the market have created a premium image of the brand. This also shows that Apple has offered a limited number of products in the market, which if diversified would damage the upscale image of the company. On the contrary, companies and competitors like Samsung have extended product line that cater to all types of customers, from lower to high-income levels. Apple has maintained its image of being an innovator by giving extra importance to the minute details of consumer usage experiences so that their preferences are examined closely.
...time, marketers have to know if it will be feasible given the nature of the market, consumer buying behavior, competition, and other environmental factors like economic conditions and government influences. They will have to decide how they will position the product versus competing products in terms of quality and price; whether it is premium price or economy price.
For instance, for the section on exchanging business cards, there were no clear guidelines and it ultimately varied according to the situational settings. However, we gathered the possible information and tweaked them into context whilst avoiding overgeneralising it. Eventually, we managed to recommend something that could be applied to most situations. Through this, I learnt that we should always be innovative as every situation is unique and consider all possible solutions before coming to a conclusion.
emerging or new market. It can originate from new technology or new market opportunities (Eliashberg, J., Lilien, G. L., & Rao, V. R. 1997). Literature defines product development as exploiting an untapped market opportunity and turning it into a value product for customer satisfaction. Development and introduction of a new product requires extensive research on understanding customer needs, market structure, emerging trends and analysing the internal & external competitive market environments. To evaluate customer satisfaction previous researches provide strong relationship between customer satisfaction and product quality, product features and value for money. ***
Pricing. Our product is priced lower than our competitors in our industry. Even though our competitors have a different kind of product compared to us.
The ease for companies to enter and exit the industry with little capital makes it appealing to anyone. The fragmentation of the industry has led to great competition, the lack of differentiation in the industry will make it hard for any company to stand out from the rest. The power of buyers and amount of competition will force companies to increase their R&D and innovation as the industry matures.
Although most innovations succeed, others fail and there are a lot of factors that can be attributed to that failure. These factors can be firm related, project related, product related or even market related (Van Der Panne, 2003). Firm related factors may be due to the firm’s culture and principles where the firm was not willing to change the way they do things and the firm’s strategy to the innovation.
The product life-cycle concept indicates as to what can be expected in the market for a new product at various stages. i.e., introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Thus, the concept of product life-cycle can be used as a forecasting tool. It can alert management that its product will inevitably face saturation and decline, and the host of problems these stages pose. The product life-cycle is also a useful framework for describing the typical evolution of marketing strategy over the stages of product life-cycle. This will help in taking sound marketing decisions at different stages of the product