Design Customer Value
Modern business marketing strategy relies on three tasks—segmentation, targeting, and positioning. ISBM Fellow Professor Robert Thomas of Georgetown University has been a leading strategist in this area.
Simply building a better product hardly guarantees business marketing success. One
must understand customer value, which in turn hinges on understanding the value
your customers’ customers will reap from your offerings.
A disciplined new product development approach is critical, as proven in the research of Professor Robert Cooper of McMaster University, another ISBM Fellow. Dr. Cooper is the author of the “Stage-Gate” process for new product development, variants of which are widely used across industries globally. Exhibit 2 diagrams a typical Stage-Gate process.
Note the special points of focus for business marketers:
- Careful attention to the “front-end” of this process is key to success: Do we really understand what our markets, especially downstream markets, need from us?
Have we put enough “front-end” work and market intelligence work into the Stage-Gate process? Dr. Griffin at University of Illinois, is a leading researcher in this area.
- Careful development of a portfolio approach to managing new product development initiatives is critical. Do we have the right mix of risk and reward in our new offering development effort? Are we “pushing the envelope” sufficiently with some of our new development experiments? Are we balancing those high-risk ventures with relatively
low risk offerings, such as product extensions?
- Finally comes the end game of new product development: the new product launch. Product debuts require special attention in business markets. Have you actually “launched” the product, or simply sent it to the shipping dock?
