The Future of Shopping Malls
The word shopping mall brings to mind certain specific kinds of images. For instance, as soon as the word mall is used, people start imagining a huge retail space filled with name brand departmental stores. Consumers have become used to these kinds of malls for the past 50 years. Also, in the initial years, both […]
Big Data and the Power to Predict
Is Big Data a Magic? We often hear the term Big Data being used to describe how online retailers as well as mega corporations are targeting the consumer behavior by having the power to predict, sense, and intuit future consumer decisions. Indeed, Big Data is talked about in hushed tones with a sense of awe […]
Key to Brand Leadership and Growth
For a long time, the marketing theories and principles of marketing experts like Phillip Kotler and others were the bible for Management and Marketing Managers. However in the last two decades, every business rule, marketing theory and guiding Organizational principles have had to be re-written, new rules for marketing have had to be defined and […]
Brand Categories
Every marketing management student would have heard the story about origin of branding, that it was initially used to identify and isolate a particular stock of cattle in the west. From the Wild West, branding as a concept has grown and changed beyond its original purpose. Today brands have become the common tool for us […]
Marketing Mix – Meaning and its Elements
Neil Borden in the year 1953 introduced the term Marketing mix, an extension of the work done by one of his associates James Culliton in 1948. Marketing Mix – A mixture of several ideas and plans followed by a marketing representative to promote a particular product or brand is called marketing mix. Several concepts and […]
More often than not, organizations spend a fortune on marketing and product development separately. This is the case with many companies that have different departments dealing with marketing and product development without any coordination.
It is left to each of the departments to try and understand what the others are saying to form a cohesive and a coherent strategy.
In the corporate world, it is common for the delivery teams to say that marketing is exerting pressure on them to reduce the time to market times and it is also common for the marketing department to say that the delivery teams do not understand what it takes to drive a product into the market. This leads to a general sense of dysfunction within the organization with teams at loggerheads with each other.
The solution in such cases is often a pragmatic look at what is causing the friction and have someone to liaise with the different departments. This means that there is a need for a product management team that tracks the entire product lifecycle starting from the conception and incubation to the marketing and after sales phases.
The need for such a product management team is often felt more in technology companies that have a laissez faire culture and there is no holistic and integrated approach to the need to develop and market products. This has resulted in spectacular failures in the mobile technology market with leading players like Nokia and Blackberry getting dethroned from their preeminent positions because they did not sense what the market wanted from them and at the same time did not intuit what makes for a great idea.
The two terms introduced above, market sensing and market intuition have entered the lexicon of management in recent years. Thanks to the profusion of companies and products in the business landscape, it is no longer enough to have a great idea or a great sales strategy.
The important thing is to “sense” the market signals and “intuit” the market mood in such a way that brilliant ideas are turned into workable and marketable products. This brings to the fore the need for a product management team that can rely the information from the marketing department to the product development team and ensure that the end-end product management is done in a professional and organized manner.
Companies that fail to read market signals and at the same time discard innovative ideas because they do not see the market potential often fail to achieve success in the marketplace.
The point here is that great ideas should be translated into products and great products must be marketed appropriately. Since it is the responsibility of the research and design and the delivery teams to come up with great ideas and make products respectively and it is the responsibility of the marketing team to market this great product in a befitting manner, the question arises as to who is going to make them talk to each other and understand each other. Of course, even in companies that do not have product management teams, marketing and research and delivery teams do communicate.
But, what if there was a coordinating team that sees the potential in new ideas from the perspective of the marketing team and at the same time intuits and senses what the market wants from the perspective of the research and delivery teams. So, this is where the product management team with its coordinating and liaising responsibilities comes into the picture.
Hence, there is an acute need for a product management team in any organization that wishes to conquer the rapidly changing marketplace.
In conclusion, there is a need to reduce the dysfunction within organizations and make them adopt a comprehensive strategy towards products and product management bridges this role perfectly.
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