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Introduction

Developing and designing great products are keys to success in business. Anything less than an excellent product strategy can be destructive to a firm. Top companies' focus on few products and concentrate on maintaining a high level of quality for those products to maximize the potential for success.
For instance Honda's focus is engines. Virtually all of Honda's sales e.g. autos, motorcycles, generators, lawn mowers, are based on its excellent engine technology. Likewise, Intel's focus is on computer chips, while Microsoft's is on PC software.

However, most products have a limited and even predictable life cycle and companies must be constantly looking for new products to design, develop and take to market. Good operations managers insist upon strong communication between customer, product, processes, and suppliers that results in a high success rate for their new products. One product strategy is to build particular competence in customizing goods or services. This approach allows the customer to choose product variations while reinforcing the organization's strength. Dell Computers, for example, has built a huge market by delivering computers with the exact hardware and software desires by the end user. And Dell does it fast - it understands that speed to market is imperative to gain a competitive edge.

Many service firms also refer their offerings as products. So while the term products may often refer to tangible goods, it also refers to offerings by service organizations. An effective product strategy links product decisions with investment, market share, product life cycle, and breadth of the product line. The objective of the product decision is to develop and implement a product strategy that meets the demands of the market place with a competitive advantage.

Goods and services selection is very important. How management selects those?

Marketers see product research as the first stage in Product Life Cycle Management. Product research is a business and engineering term which describes the complete process of bringing a new product to market. There are two parallel aspects to this process: -

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* Contributed by: -
Vidhu Goyal,
Graduate from IMT Ghaziabad, Batch of 2006,
Currently working with Max New York Life in Gurgaon.