Traditional Approach (to New Product development):

Step1:

The first thing to do is create a business plan—document describing the size of an opportunity, the client problem to be solved, and the value to client which the new product will provide. Typically it includes a five-year forecast for income, profits, and cash flow.

Step2:

Once a convincing business plan is ready—obtain money from investors— R&D product development team begins developing the product (with minimum client intervention)—product gets ready—sales force puts full effort in selling.

Fallacies/Cons of Conventional approach to product development:

1. R & D product developers invest thousands of man-hours to get the new product ready for launch, with little if any customer input. The fallacy is the premise/assumption that after few initial discussions with clients, they know exactly what client desire

2. Essentially, its after the launching of product does the new product venture get substantial feedback from customers—when the sales force attempts to sell it.

3. And too often, after months or even years of development, organization learns the hard way that customers do not need or want most of the product’s features!

New Lean approach to product launch:

Here first, instead of writing a flawless business plan, we as marketer summarize and

develop only a business plan outline, I want to call it as “iterative business plan”.

Rather than engaging in months of planning and research, we first accept that all we have

on day one is a series of untested hypotheses—basically, good guesses, with this thought

in mind we prepare “iterative business plan”.

Second, our R&D rapidly develops the minimum viable products and marketing

team immediately take customer feedback. Then, we use customers input to revise the

business plan (hence the word Iterative). We re-start the cycle over again, testing

redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) to ideas that aren’t

yielding results.

Advantages of lean product Development:

Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles that pre-suppose knowledge

of customers problems and product needs, lean development eliminates wasted

time and resources by developing product iteratively and incrementally.

In contrast to traditional product development, in which each stage occurs in

linear order and lasts for months, lean development builds “minimum viable

product”—containing only critical features—gathers feedback on it from

customers, and then starts over with a revised minimum viable product.

The lean approach helps launch products that customers actually want, far more

quickly and cheaply than traditional methods

Lean approach if implemented successfully is less risky in new product launches

than the traditional approach/

While R&D product development team develops “minimum viable product

offering”, we as marketers work and develop Marketing Blue print for that new

product:

Marketing Blue Print—Go-To-Market strategy for New Product launch

We all understand that it’s extremely difficult to say how long current trends will remain significant —innovative technologies are popping up even faster than we all can forecast —and it’s impossible to tell which new trends could emerge during our market campaign and may thwart all our marketing efforts. So, its really important to have flexible mind-set because we’re not only managing complex projects—these projects also have got many unknowns!

We also need to be flexible in our approach because this allows us to measure impact and determine whether to keep going, make adjustments-fine tune or scrap what we’re doing and start over.

For example: If later on, we happen to find out that our PPC ads (pay per click) for new product were carrying significant traffic, but aren’t converting to sale, so in Phase II PPC ads could be replaced with a direct-mail campaign.

We can always start small and as we test the waters, we can tweak our strategy … for example, if we’re going to run a series of pay-per-click advertisements, we should begin with a small budget of only a few Lacs. Run the PPC ads for a few weeks, analyze our results, and if successful, we can increase the budget. By doing this, if a more attractive medium comes along in near future — or if an unexpected obstacle interferes with our campaign — we’ll have a chance to make adjustments.

Marketing Blue Print: It’s components:

A. Advertising Campaign B. Marketing material (presentation, brochures etc) design C. Promotion in International and National events D. Sales strategy and its implementation

A. Advertising Campaign: Following is the ad-campaign to be done in “Phased-Manner”:

Phase I (Weeks 1-6): Announcements and Initial Advertising:

Submition of Press Releases: detailing the product and its reinforcement through social media.

Going live on the e-platforms like facebook, linkd-in, youtube, twitter/ Adding banners to homepage: showcasing the new product—projected to be our

top seller in an year Initiate e-mail blasts: to email client and dealer database Introduce weekly articles: each highlighting features of new product and syndicate

through social media. Begin Google PPC/ ad-words campaign: for new product, highlighting the

‘keywords’

Phase II (Weeks 7-14): Ad Reinforcement and Customer Engagement

Reach out through other advertising channels: medical magazines and direct mailers

B. Marketing Material Design:

Presentations design for internal and external communication

Brochure and datasheet design

Banners and flex design

Press releases and web news design

Weekly articles design

Target opinion leaders

Evaluation report collection from opinion leaders

Target E-mail database creation for e-mail blasts

Target hospital database creation

Target HOD/senior scientists database creation

C. Promotion in National and International events:

Target list of National medical events for New Product Launch

Target list International events for New Product Launch

Sales follow up for the leads creation

D. Sales strategy and its implementation:

Lean product offering:

Idea is to market “minimum acceptable product” and get feedbacks from clients and

redesign/finetune the product offering along with the sales channels and structure.