Now a day the companies are spending lot of expenditure on development of the product. As it is very difficult for the company to carry on with the existing product. So developing a new product development policy is very essential for the survival and growth of the company. Product development process passes through eight stages and they are discussed below:

1.) Idea generation:- with the changing technology there is the need to generate the idea regarding new product development as the existing product becomes obsolete with the time and technology. The idea to generate new product can be developed by doing research of the market sources like consumer liking, disliking, competitor policy, from the employees etc.

2.) Idea screening:– after the first stage of product development process, when the company has number of ideas, in that case there is the need to accept the good idea and reject the bad one. As accepting the wrong idea can result into lot of loss of money, technology, time and energy. So it is better to reject the bad idea as soon as possible.

3.) Concept development:– after screening of the idea there is the need to develop the concept in meaningful customer terms. For eg. In case the company is producing a soap which has high nutritional value then the question arises either to introduce it as a tasty soap or as a rich nutritional soap. The most suitable concept is then picked up. The consumer can be asked to react to each concept and they can help in determining a concept having strong liking of the consumer.

4.) Market strategy development:– at this stage the marketer has to decide what kind of marketing strategy to be used for the product either to launch the product in the entire market or in a particular area.

5.) Business analysis:- in this stage the marketer has to decide whether they are able to achieve projected sale or profit. if the answer to the question is yes then the product concept move to product development stage.

6.) Product development:– if the answer to above question is yes then the next stage product development starts. Here the research and development department develop a physical product. Then they are put under functional and consumer test. Functional tests are done in the laboratory and consumer test is done by bringing consumer in the laboratory.

7.) Test marketing:- after the product development stage the product is ready to come in the market with a proper brand name and packaging. The aim of this stage is to find out how large the market is.

8.) Commercialization:-  the last stage is the commercialization of the product. While launching the product the marketer has to keep in mind the following questions:

Ø     When to launch the product?

Ø     For whom the product to be launched?

Ø     How to introduce the product in the market?

Ø     Where to launch the product?

Therefore, all these are the product development decision process.

You can see my other article “4 types of product policy decision“.

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