Product Planning Essentials, Second Edition

Citation

Geoffrey P. Lantos (2013), "Product Planning Essentials, Second Edition", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 22 No. 4, pp. 323-324. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-07-2012-0164

If you are new to the field of new product (NP) planning and are seeking a basic primer on new product development (NPD) and management (for either the classroom or conference room) that is not very technical and rigorous, then this book is for you. Its focus is NP planning – “that process through which a product is conceived, brought to market, and managed across the life cycle” (p. 3). It moves from the elementary elements of what constitutes a product, through fundamental issues of NP strategy, the NP development process (NPDP), and organizing for NPs, to the details on each of the stages in the NPDP (some covered in more depth than others), ending with issues of product life cycle (PLC) management (typically neglected in NPD education), global NP planning, legal and public policy concerns, and documented best practices. Fundamental concepts, tools, and techniques for new products management are presented throughout.

For readers familiar with the 2001 edition, this update presents two new chapters on design and global issues, plus discussion of relatively new concepts such as sustainable product development and the base of pyramid product development. The book is targeted toward undergraduates, graduate students, and executive education students in either schools of business or design and engineering, as well as professionals leading their firm ' s new product activities or (more likely) their less seasoned team participants.

The book is organized into fourteen chapters. The first three provide an overview of product planning, the next seven sequentially cover the various stages of the NPDP, and the remaining four concern life cycle management, global and legal issues, and best practices. Following is a condensed synopsis of these chapters.

1 1. Introduction to product planning

The basics of the nature of products, nature and types of NPs, and of product planning as well as what constitutes NP success are outlined, including key definitions and issues inherent in product planning.

2 2. Strategy and process

The NPDP is discussed in the context of corporate planning and the product-market matrix. A concise overview of the steps in the NPDP is given, including differences between the process depending on whether ideas are to be constrained by strategy and whether a market-pull vs technology-push approach is used.

3 3. Organizing people

Organizational options, interdepartmental integration, and teams (types, structure, roles, and a few brief pointers on making teams effective) are all covered in this chapter.

4 4. Opportunity identification

The fourth chapter begins a series of chapters, each covering a stage in the NPDP. Sources of NP opportunities are outlined. Both market segmentation and technology segmentation are discussed, and the elements of the product innovation charter are outlined.

5 5. Concept generation

Following a discourse on the product concept statement, various techniques for generating concepts are presented: needs assessment, scenario analysis, group creativity (manly brainstorming), attribute analysis (gap analysis), relationship analysis (two-dimensional matrix, morphological matrix, and conjoint analysis), and lateral search techniques. Chapter 5 also discusses the nature of creativity and how to stimulate it.

6 6. Concept evaluation

The sixth chapter includes brief discussions of types of concept testing, scoring models and snake plots, and financial analysis using both the awareness-trial-availability-repeat (ATAR) model and expected commercial value (ECV) approaches.

7 7. Technical development

Much in-depth treatment of technical development and technical design considerations is offered in this chapter. After a brief description of the product protocol follows more thorough discussions of principles of design for excellence (DFX) and quality function deployment (QFD), as well as an introduction to the theory of innovative problem solving (TIPS) and the Kano model. The chapter concludes with a discussion of product use testing, including its types (alpha, beta, and gamma testing) and decisions to be made (e.g. test objectives, test group composition, duration of product use experience, etc.), although guidance for choosing among options is not given.

8 8. Design

Design is treated in depth in this chapter from the applied arts perspective commonly used by disciplines such as industrial design, graphic design, and interior design. It includes a description of design elements (balance, contrast, emphasis, etc.), categories of design and objectives of each, and the various design disciplines (industrial design, graphic design, and interior design).

9 9. Market planning

This chapter overviews the basics of marketing planning, including the situation analysis (3 Cs: company, competitors, and customers) and sales analysis, marketing objectives, marketing mix (4Ps), marketing strategy budget, and control, plus a brief discussion of business planning considerations for entrepreneurs.

10 10. Commercialization and launch

Included here are discussions of market testing methods (pseudo sale, controlled sale, and full sale), product launch (Roger ' s adoption and diffusion processes, launch cycle, prelaunch preparation and control, and launch process), and new product forecasting techniques (judgmental techniques such as the Delphi method, quantitative techniques such as time series and regression modeling, and marketing research techniques such as concept and premarket tests) as well as the sticky issue of new product forecasting accuracy.

11 11. Life cycle management

The eleventh chapter reviews the PLC concept and appropriate marketing strategies in each PLC stage, with an emphasis on preserving brands in the maturity stage. Chapter 11 also discusses product platforms, product families, and product mixes as well as brand management and a detailed treatment of building brand equity. It concludes with a discussion of branding decisions (brand sponsor, line and brand extensions, etc., which actually are made prior to launch, not during life cycle management) and of the brand-switching matrix.

12 12. Global issues in product planning

Topics treated here include Keegan ' s five global marketing strategies (product and promotional adaptation vs extension vs invention), global culture and language, global NPD teams and the special challenges they face, sustainable product development, and the base of pyramid product development.

13 13. Legal and public policy considerations

This covers the key regulatory and ethical issues of NP management. Legal considerations include intellectual property (patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights), product liability, and legal types of business entities (sole proprietorships, C and S corporations, and unincorporated entities). Public policy issues included are environmental concerns, product performance and customer service, and morality.

14 14. Product planning best practices

This final chapter summarizes key findings from noteworthy studies of success/failure factors, including those of the American Productivity Quality Center, the PDMA ' s Comparative Performance Assessment Study (a study Kahn co-authored), as well as a classic Business Week article and a once-leading textbook (Urban and Hauser, 1993). Lessons from PDMA ' s Outstanding Corporate Innovator Awards and the Kahn, Barczak, and Moss Best Practices Framework are also presented. This discussion captures the essence of that makes for successful NPD.

Product Planning Essentials ' strength is its concise yet reasonably comprehensive coverage of most of the basics of new product management. Although the author ' s background is primarily in marketing and the book ' s perspective is management, it also covers well the technical side of NPD and presents much such material not found in Crawford and Di Benedetto ' s (2011) best-selling textbook. It is also well balanced between consumer and business products as well as simple and complex (including high-tech) products. After digesting Product Planning Essentials, students and practitioners should understand most of the fundamentals of NPD. In fact, as an instructor of a new products management course for over 20 years, I was nonetheless able to find a number of interesting examples to use in my lectures plus some information of which I was unaware or only vaguely aware.

The book ' s principal weakness is that its concise, broad coverage sacrifices deep coverage of some significant topics, such as concept testing, entrepreneurial new products, scoring models, financial analysis, problem analysis, product innovation charter, product protocol, product use testing, prototypes, services, and test marketing, as well as lack of coverage (or else mere mention) of important topics such as agile product development, benchmarking, co-development/open innovation, concurrent engineering, external idea sources, packaging, positioning and gap analysis, product portfolio analysis, and success and failure rates.

The book could serve as a standalone textbook in a half-semester new products management course, although for a full-semester course it should be supplemented with one or more professional trade books (see the “Bookstore” link on the PDMA website for lists and descriptions of professional books about NPD). Managerially focused books include Cooper ' s Winning at New Products, Wheelwright and Clark ' s Revolutionizing Product Development, and Karol and Nelson ' s New Product Development for Dummies, among others. Books with an engineering and design focus include Product Design and Development by Ulrich and Eppinger and New Product and Brand Management by Lilien and Rangaswamy.

In short, this is definitely a book worth reading by newbies in the field of NPD.