The reality in product development has not changed a bit: output is almost always equal to input. Product or service success depends on the depth of marketing intelligence behind the product concept. A business would have to learn as much as it could about the consumers to conceive a perfect idea of what those consumers need. Of course, consumers won’t shirk what they need except they lack the means.
For real, very few consumers remain the same for too long. New income levels, technological, medical and scientific researches, sociological and climatic activism transform consumers thinking, which automatically impact buying behaviours. This is why great businesses devote as much marketing effort to influencing buying behaviours as they devote to placing products on the shelves. These businesses conduct wider market survey by asking questions and observing reactions from target market to develop an accurate, in-depth understanding of future markets in order to form a strong product concept.
Today’s rapidly changing environment, in addition to the intense competitive landscape, demand businesses tag along the consumers every mile of the experiential journey. It is therefore not surprising that the most contentious issues in the market these days is how much tech businesses know about users. This ‘market-snooping’ is not restricted to tech firms. Manufacturers of all kinds of goods contract marketing research firms to follow up their markets in a bid to keep abreast of buyers’ and users’ sentiments. In this case, the battle for market-shares has been taken beyond the mere retail shelves to the minds of the consumers: It is sort of, “What are they thinking? what triggers them? where are they planning to go next?
Unknown to the whole globe the desire to provide timely answers to those questions are the driving force behind space farming, a bid by Amazon, Facebook, SpaceX, Russia, and China to place satellites in orbits. The whole space over every consumer head is littered with giant tech facilities roaming to grab as much data are being put to use by businesses. The mobile devices in every consumer’s pocket help tech firms and software manufacturers to obtain as much information details about the consumers carrying them than ever. Smart home devices monitor and store vital family data as possible. The scanners at retail store checkouts keep vital purchasing information that are reserved for use in the factories and corporate boardrooms.
When a business chooses not to know as much as it should know about its market; its competitors are going all the way to press for details that are transformed into products and marketing strategies that are too good to fail.
Mike Gospe, the author of Marketing Campaign Development: What Marketing Executives Need to Know about Architecting Global Integrated Marketing Campaigns wrote that, “Whoever understand the customer more wins”. Instead of starting the market share fight at the shelves space, kickstart the battle at the product concept stages where as much data are obtained to develop products and services that are too good to be ignored by consumers.
That was Black and Decker made its best Do-It-Yourself handheld drills and won multiple awards in the 1900s.
