Lesson 3/Week 6: Invent on Behalf of the Customer

Materials covered this week included:

• Read Chapter 6: Developing Product and Brand Strategy, the Cleopatra case, and the article Apple and Innovation:  From Ruins to Riches
• Watched the Rory Sutherland's TedTalk video and Parts 1/2 of the recorded lecture

Deliverables:

I have an idea I'm excited about for our Individual Ideation Project.  My segment will focus on meeting the needs of working adults who are pursuing graduate degrees and are also looking to change careers  We'll see if it gets picked by the Prof as one of the best ideas...

I also have to complete a 10 question quiz, so I'll have to review the first six weeks' worth of material. 

Lessons Learned:

This week's lesson was focused on the product development process.  We learned about the product life cycle, which is a cool concept.  I never paid much attention to it, but I guess all products eventually die.  The four stages are:  Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.  The early stages are characterized by rapid sales growth, which levels off by the Maturity stage and eventually declines.  Profits are highest in the maturity stage.  

There are various things a company can do to prolong this cycle and harvest profits for as long as possible.  For instance, marketers can continue with product development, changing features that refresh an offering.  They can do marketing development by expanding to new geographical markets.  They can also target deeper market penetration by highlighting secondary uses and trying to improve the usage rates of a product. 

We also learned about the new product development process, which has 8 steps, although different sources will have a different number.   It all starts with Ideation, and ultimately ends with Commercialization.  The biggest takeaway for me was that it is important that there IS a process, even more than what the specific steps are.  Companies have to be disciplined in how they go about developing new products, or it will just increase the already high failure rates.

In Sutherland's Life Lessons from an Add man, he made awesome points about how so much value is intangible value, which relates to the book's concept of brand equity.  My favorite quote was (paraphrasing) "Saving is just needlessly delaying consumerism."  What would the world be like without brands.  I am convinced that if I ever want to strike out on my own, building a brand may be the most important part of the business.  Continual innovation combined with a strong brand may be the only thing that comes close to creating sustainable competitive advantage.