Step 7.13

Test market and/or trial sell product.

Primary Findings

Secondary Findings

Primary findings

Barriers

Adopting new technologies is presumed to be a logical decision; however individual users determine for themselves the costs and benefits of investing in new tech, including their own natural resistance to change. If the return on investment doesn’t support the change, not adopting new tech is the rational choice for the user.
Case study findings
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R&D personnel sees the market study and market testing stages as considerably less important than do marketing/sales personnel.
Survey findings.
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Carriers

Results from product platforming efforts are proven to last throughout the product life cycle in comparison to non-platformed products.
Case study analysis
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Physicians as end users can contribute meaningful information to manufacturers and regulators governing healthcare and drugs.
Case-based research
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Educate each department about the purpose of each NPD stage along with each department’s role and responsibility in that stage. And special effort needs to be made to have R&D and top management understand the purpose and value of marketing-related stages in the new product development process.
Survey findings.
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Methods

As ExxonMobil's NPD process progresses, marketing activities scale up from limited sampling with key customers to much more significant work in trials with customers using the new product.
Industry experience.
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Have technical NPD team member present during sales presentations
Survey.
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Performance Drivers: One is the Quality of Execution. Eight activities distinguish best from worse performers: 1) Conducting a post-launch review (8.2); 2) Assessment of product's value to business (2.1); 3) Test market or trial sell to a limited set of customers (7.13); 4) Concept testing to determine customer reaction to product and gauging purchase intent before Development begins (4.11); 5) Idea Generation (1.3); 6) Customer tests of products under real-life conditions (6.3); 7) Detailed market study/research or Voice of the Customer (4.3, 4.13); 8) Pre-launch business analysis (7.7, 7.8, 7.9).
A quantitative survey of 105 business units, supported by team's experience in NPD modeling, consultation, application and analysis.
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Techniques for gathering voice of the customer information include: use of customer complaints, internal market research, focus groups, one-to-one interviews, phone interviews, contextual inquiry, customer behavior studies, and perceptual mapping.
Literature review and case studies
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Utilization of market research early in the new product development process, and continuing throughout the entire development phase is critical to ensuring success.
Survey data.
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Voice of the Customer Information as a Best Practice for the NPD process: 1) Market and buyer behavior studies are a valuable source of information for planning the market launch. 2) Market research as a tool to help define the product. 3) The customer or user ought to be an integral part of the Development process. 4) Identification of customers or users real or un-articulated needs and their problems, is considered fundamental to voice-of-the-customer research, and should be a key input to product design. 5) Working with highly innovative users or customers.
A quantitative survey of 105 business units, supported by team's experience in NPD modeling, consultation, application and analysis.
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Measures

Full scale test marketing can be used to obtain sales forecasts and market share data. Marketing strategies can also be tested for effectiveness. This activity can produce valuable information, however, it can also be costly and time consuming. Therefore organizations should carefully consider the risks of test market activities for high-risk products or products entering unstable markets.
Literature Review
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Pretest market studies can be used to obtain sales and marketing data prior to a large-scale test market or full-scale launch. Best used for low cost/low risk packaged goods.
Literature Review
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Tips

Think of market as potential customers, not persons in need of assistance.
Case study findings
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Involvement of customers with strong past ties will result in the development of products with higher competitive performance than those that involve customers with no or few past ties. However, this practice is most effective when developing incremental products, rather than highly innovative products.
Survey of 137 new product development projects.
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Overall, product quality, relative to competitors (as defined by the customer), was ranked as the most important factor in how the product performed in the market. Product "value" compared with that of competitors and the clinical effectiveness of the product were then ranked as the next most important aspects, respectively.
Survey results from medical device manufacturers.
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To improve short-term competitive performance of products in the marketplace, projects to develop incremental new products should involve homogeneous groups of customers.
Survey of 137 product development projects.
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Secondary findings

Methods

The market research methods most frequently cited by Fortune 500 companies include: focus groups (used by 68% of companies surveyd); limited rollout (42%); concept tests (26%); show tests and clinics (19%); attitude and usage studies (19%); conjoint analysis (15%); Delphi (9%); quality function deployment (9%); home usage tests (9%); product life-cycle models (8%); and synetics (8%).
Source: Mahajan and Wind, (1992). In: May-Plumlee, T. & Little, T.J. (2006)

Tips

Among computer and medical equipment manufacturers, successful new products incorporated greater use of market information in the NPD process, while failed products used less.
Source: Ottum & Moore, 1997. In: Suwannapron, P., Speece, M (2003)