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the subject is Marketing. 2nd Canadian edition

Lamb Chapter 10 Web Exercise

Developing and Managing Products

Vignette: A Heinz company employee took an idea from her little girl at home to the marketing department at work, and a new ketchup product was developed.

Featured URL: www.heinz.com

Belt Buddy
How many times have you or someone you know had an idea for a new product? It can be as simple as this: It's a hot summer day and you are wearing a sleeveless, low-cut T-shirt while driving to the lake. You notice that your seat belt is irritating your neck. As you crank up the music and deal with cottage traffic, you keep fretting about the belt irritation and end up putting a towel next to the exposed skin. This becomes the seed of an idea to develop the "belt buddy"-a furry, velcro-fastened cover that cushions the belt.

Before you can get your Belt Buddy idea to market, you see something similar in a novelty shop and buy it. It works great and solves your seat belt problem. OK, so you won't get the property rights to this invention, but perhaps you could help it find a larger market. How many other people could use one of these? How would you market it? Ads in Auto Trader? A big display at Canadian Tire?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a Center for Innovation in Production Development. Read about the center's product development system at http://web.mit.edu/cipd/research/prdctdevelop.htm . At this site, you can download papers and articles related to product development. For this, you will need a pdf file reader such as Adobe® Acrobat® Reader®.

At MIT's Sloan Center there is a project called the Virtual Customer Initiative. The interactivity of the Web is enabling users to design their own virtual products. This enables product development teams to understand complex feature interactions; it also enables customers to learn their own preferences for really new products. These methods are proving valuable for identifying opportunities, improving the design and engineering of products, and testing ideas and concepts much earlier in the process, when less time and money is at risk.

See the demos for copiers, cameras, laptop bags, and crossover vehicles. These demonstrations are designed to get customer feedback. In your opinion, which of them does that best? Explain your choice.

Resources

Article: "Making Choices and Selecting the Right Provider: How Web-Enabled Tools Can Help Optimize New Product Initiatives" by Scott Elliott, Bob Gill and Beebe Nelson, Product Development and Management Association.


Extend the Activity

These Web Exercises provide an additional opportunity for exploration of Chapter 10.

1. Protecting Your Product Ideas

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office provides patent, copyright, trademark, industrial design, and other registrations to inventors who have created new products and want to protect their intellectual property. Learn and discover at Canada's Think Links. If you invented a new product, how would you protect your intellectual property rights?

2. Sweet Spot

Article: Product Development Consulting, Inc., "Targeting the Sweet Spot on the Customer Value Map" from Discoveries newsletter, Issue 1.

Read the above article and answer this question: "Why should value to the customer, not value to the company, drive product development decisions?"

3. A Little Insight

Go to the Insight Product Development site listed in the Resources section. This is a fourteen-year-old product design and development firm with offices in Chicago and Boston. Its clients include Hewlett Packard, Whirlpool, Microsoft, and many other leading and emerging firms. Its award-winning team partners with clients to bring products to market quickly and cost-effectively.

Go to the following on-line galleries for examples of product design:


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Activity Resources Extend the Activity