Planning a Market-Focused Product Line

A Fortune 500 company’s product generation process was yielding a collection of “me too” products that weren’t clearly differentiated in the market place or that were coordinated with other products in the same customer ecosystem.  Uncoordinated product development teams initiated activities based on technologies they found interesting.  These teams placed little emphasis on longer-term, deep market understanding, resulting in short-sighted product development.  Guidance from Marketing was often received after Product Development had significant plans in place.

Using a network approach to optimize marketing resources, a MarketFrames team installed a new marketing structure to address this issue.  The resulting client team worked closely with a MarketFrames team to re-engineer three critical processes – business planning, product generation, and product introduction.  

The results from the new marketing structure and processes were:
  • Clearly articulated responsibilities between Marketing and Product Development in each phase of the product generation process 
  • Market-based guidance and Voice of the Customer input much earlier in the product generation processes, freeing up product development resources to focus on engineering
  • Better orchestrated product offering more easily understood by customers
  • Category plans that showed how technology investments aligned with market opportunities and over time, would lead to a winning market position.