Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 12.7 
Strategic role of 
new products
Strategic role
Maintain technology leadership
Enter new markets
Meet competitive threat or segment the market
Maintain market share
Defend market position/prevent decline
Exploit technology in a new/novel way
Make most of distribution strengths
New product type
New to the world
New product line
New to the world
New to the world
New product line
Repositioning
New product line
Repositioning
Extensions to existing product line
Repositioning
Cost reduction
Modifications to existing product line
New to the world
New product line
Extensions to existing product line

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THE NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
creativity of individuals and the methods of idea generation can be employed to obtain 
novel ideas.
Creativity and productive ideation – really innovative ideas come out of inspiration 
and use appropriate techniques. Because of the high mortality rate of new ideas, it is 
desirable to generate and consider a large number of them. The use of appropriate meth-
ods to generate new product ideas can improve the productivity of in-house ideas genera-
tion. A company can also facilitate the generation of innovative new product ideas by 
creating an environment that will induce and facilitate creativity. How can the creative 
potential of individuals be harnessed, and what techniques aid the creative ideas genera-
tion process?
Defining creativity – creativity is the combining of previously unrelated parts into a use-
ful whole so that one can get more out of the emergent whole than one has put in (Miller, 
1996). This explanation of creativity suggests that one condition has to be satisfied for really 
novel ideas to emerge, which is that many widely disparate ideas must coexist long enough 
in the individual’s mind to combine, to yield a ‘useful whole’.
The creative process is not easily implemented, and many managers would assert that 
creativity cannot be supervised, unlike the pursuit of quality or other functional operations. 
It is not possible to predict when a creative person will generate a novel idea. It is almost as 
if management should leave outbursts of creative thinking to nature and chance. However, 
contrary to conventional wisdom, creativity can be managed. Rather than spotting crea-
tive individuals within the firm and encouraging them to tap their creative potential, the 
manager would do better to ask if barriers to creative thinking exist and, if so, how these 
barriers might be overcome.
Nonetheless, there may also something in the view that fresh thinking about impor-
tant issues should not be the preserve of conventional executives skilled in running the 
existing business. Companies need to think about attracting unconventional people with 
unconventional ideas – possibly ‘weird’ people – to become in-house mavericks. How-
ever, managing mavericks is usually far from easy, and they need a ‘maverick-friendly’ 
environment in which to operate. At the same time, one must take care not to alienate 
other employees by giving overtly ‘special treatment’ to these mavericks. Google is a high 
performer that employs such people, but this is not just about the new economy – com-
panies such as IBM and Procter & Gamble are also exploring ways of capturing maverick 
creativity and innovation to channel it into mainstream business (Taylor and LaBarre, 
2008). Dan Cable argues that if your goal is to create something that is valuable, rare and 
hard to imitate, then, compared to your competitors, your people need to be downright 
strange (Cable, 2007). He argues that far from benchmarking against competitors, we 
should aim to accentuate differences in our thinking, even to the point of becoming a 
little strange. That way you can focus on an obsession with commitment to doing things 
differently (and better) than anyone else. Strange is weird but good in thinking strategi-
cally about innovation.
For example, some product designers are turning to ‘extreme users’, from obsessive 
cleaners to dominatrices, to get new ideas: a cocktail expert shares tips on the quality and 
complexity of ice with a home appliance maker; dominatrices share the secret of how to 
avoid blisters from wearing uncomfortable high-heeled shoes; and skateboards were devel-
oped and branded after sports equipment manufacturers spotted teenagers improvising 
their own. Designers are finding that mavericks, outliers and obsessives can provide ideas 
for new products and valuable improvements (Clegg, 2014).
Aids to idea generation – some of the many techniques that can help creative thinking – 
are shown in Table 12.1. The best way is to use a variety of approaches. Leeway is essential 
so it’s important to try out, adapt and fit approaches to the problem at hand. There are 
many possible approaches: suggestion boxes; competitive products analysis or negative 
engineering; patents searches; customer need assessment; and problem-detection studies. 
There are almost as many techniques as there are creative people.

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