Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
1. Product
2. Software product
3. Product management
3.1. Product planning
3.2. Product marketing
3.3. Product design process
3.3.1. Opportunity Identification
3.3.2. Consumer Measurement
3.3.3. Models of Consumers
3.3.4. Prediction of Market Behavior
3.3.5. Evaluation
3.3.6. Refinement
3.4. Key points of the design process
3.4.1. Pre-production design
3.4.2. Design during production
3.4.3. Post-production design feedback for future designs
3.4.4. Redesign
3.5. Product Engineering
3.5.1. Benefits by providing customized product to market
3.6. Product Development
3.6.1. The Product Development Process
3.6.2. Elements of the new product development
4. Marketing Management
4.1. Marketing
4.2. Concept of Marketing
4.3. Levels of marketing
4.4. Marketing mix
4.5. Marketing communications
5. Marketing planning
5.1. The marketing planning process
5.2. Content of the marketing plan
5.3. Detailed plans and programs
5.4. Measurement of Progress
5.5. Performance analysis
6. Software Product Marketing
6.1. Strategies to improve software product marketing
6.1.1. Expert websites
6.1.2. Web Promotion
6.2. Online Software Product Marketing
6.2.1. Basic online software marketing techniques
6.3. Steps to improve software product marketing
6.3.1. Portfolio Management:
6.3.2. Product Development:
6.3.3. Ideation:
6.4. Foundation
6.4.1. Collaboration
6.4.2. Business Intelligence
6.4.3. Requirements Management
6.5. Software Product Marketing At Non-Domestic Areas
6.5.1. Various benefits of Non-Domestic sales
6.5.2. The various drawbacks of non-domestic sales
7. Strategies for Maintaining and Improving Quality
7.1. Definitions of Quality
7.1.1. External Quality
7.1.2. Internal Quality
7.2. Strategies for improving internal and external quality
8. The Product Life Cycle
1. Product:
In marketing, a product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a
want or need. In retailing, products are called merchandise. In manufacturing,
products are purchased as raw materials and sold as finished goods. Commodities are
usually raw materials such as metals and agricultural products, but a commodity can
also be anything widely available in the open market.
2. Software Product
Examples of business software products include the Oracle 10g database by Oracle
Corporation, SAP R/3 ERP software by SAP AG, QuickBooks by Intuit, etc.
3. Product management
When the company wants to provide a product to the market then company should
take care of following things.
The design process can be viewed as being made up of a managerial and consumer
component. The managerial sub process represents a categorization of the types of
managerial decisions made in new product development.
3.2.1. Opportunity Identification
The managerial sub process begins with opportunity identification through market
definition as a proactive design strategy. Management examines the opportunities,
searches for new opportunities, and from these opportunities selects the market that
has the great potential to achieve managerial tools.
Early in the design process the emphasis should be on gaining an understanding of the
consumer, thus the consumer response investigation begins with qualitative consumer
measurement. The qualitative measurement puts management in touch with market
by providing insight on what motivates consumers, how consumers see the market,
how consumer make their purchases, and so on.
They identify the design features and products characteristics that make the greatest
compact on consumer response and direct the design process to the product or service
strategy that is most likely to succeed in the marketplace.
Perception identifies the key dimensions that are most relevant to consumer.
Preference identifies how consumers use the perceived dimensions to evaluate
product.
Segmentation determines whether the best strategy is to have one product for all
consumers or whether to have a multiplicity of products, each directed at a specific
group consumers.
3.2.5. Evaluation
Management weights this prediction as well as production costs, political constraints,
technology constraints, material availability, firm image, complementary with product
line, and other aspects of new product introduction to arrive at GO/NO GO decision.
3.2.6. Refinement
3.3.4. Redesign - any or all stages in the design process repeated (with corrections
made) at any time before, during, or after production.
With the experience and expertise in Product Development company should bring a
number of advantages. The value propositions include:
Reduced time to market: With extensive capabilities and resources at our disposal,
company should offer a broad range of product design services at short notice,
reducing time to market.
Enhanced Innovation: company should handle a large part of the “well proven”
product module, which can keep resources focused on enhanced high-end
innovations.
Product Quality: product design services apply stringent quality control measures,
which ensure high levels of quality in all product designs.
In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) is the term used to
describe the complete process of bringing a new product or service to market. There
are two parallel paths involved in the NPD process: one involves the idea generation,
product design, and detail engineering; the other involves market research and
marketing analysis.
When the NPD process getting started following elements should be considered.
Idea selection: Its purpose is to choose whether to pursue an idea by analyzing its
potential business value.
Concept and Technology Development: During this, the business case is developed
based on estimates of the total available market, customer needs, investment
requirements, and competition analysis and project uncertainty.
• Product positioning
• Promoting the product externally with press, customers, and partners
• Bringing new products to market
• Monitoring the competition
4. Marketing Management
4.1. Marketing
Introduction
Two major factors of marketing are the recruitment of new customers (acquisition)
and the retention and expansion of relationships with existing customers (base
management).
"Marketing" is an instructive business domain that serves to inform and educate target
markets about the value and competitive advantage of a company and its products.
“Value” is worth derived by the customer from owning and using the product.
“Competitive Advantage” is a description that the company or its products are each
doing something better than their competition in a way that could benefit the
customer.
Marketing is focused on the task of conveying pertinent company and product related
information to specific customers, and there are a multitude of decisions (strategies)
to be made within the marketing domain regarding what information to deliver, how
much information to deliver, to whom to deliver, how to deliver, when to deliver, and
where to deliver. Once the decisions are made, there are numerous ways (tactics) and
processes that could be employed in support of the selected strategies.
Defined marketing as every strategy and decision made in the following areas:
The goal of marketing is to build and maintain a preference for a company and its
products within the target markets. The goal of any business is to build mutually
profitable and sustainable relationships with its customers. While all business
domains are responsible for accomplishing this goal, the marketing domain bears a
significant share of the responsibility.
Within the larger scope of its definition, marketing is performed through the actions
of three coordinated disciplines named: “Product Marketing”, “Corporate Marketing”,
and “Marketing Communications”.
To get success in market the company should take care of the following levels.
Those are:
Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual
goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a
product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and
support.
Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including
discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for
the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for
example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been
called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g.
online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young
adults, families, business people), etc. also referring to how the environment in which
the product is sold in can affect sales.
People: Any person coming into contact with customers can have an impact on
overall satisfaction. Whether as part of a supporting service to a product or involved
in a total service, people are particularly important because, in the customer's eyes,
they are generally inseparable from the total service. As a result of this, they must be
appropriately trained, well motivated and the right type of person. Fellow customers
are also sometimes referred to under 'people', as they too can affect the customer's
service experience, (e.g., at a sporting event).
Process: This is the process involved in providing a service and the behavior of
people, which can be crucial to customer satisfaction.
Participation: This is to allow the customer to participate in what the brand should
stand for; what should be the product directions and even which ads to run. This
concept is laying the foundation for disruptive change through democratization of
information.
Predictive modeling: This refers to algorithms that are being successfully applied in
marketing problems (both a regression as well as a classification problem).
Advertising
Paid form of public presentation and expressive promotion of ideas
Customer focus
Many companies today have a customer focus (or customer orientation). This implies
that the company focuses its activities and products on consumer demands. Generally
there are three ways of doing this: the customer-driven approach, the sense of
identifying market changes and the product innovation approach.
In the consumer-driven approach, consumer wants are the drivers of all strategic
marketing decisions. No strategy is pursued until it passes the test of consumer
research. Every aspect of a market offering, including the nature of the product itself,
is driven by the needs of potential consumers. The starting point is always the
consumer. The rationale for this approach is that there is no point spending R&D
funds developing products that people will not buy. History attests to many products
that were commercial failures in spite of being technological breakthroughs.
The SIVA Model provides a demand/customer centric version alternative to the well-
known 4Ps supply side model (product, price, place, promotion) of marketing
management.
Product → Solution
Promotion → Information
Price → Value
Place → Access
The model focuses heavily on the customer and how they view the transaction.
Product focus
In a product innovation approach, the company pursues product innovation, and then
tries to develop a market for the product. Product innovation drives the process and
marketing research is conducted primarily to ensure that a profitable market
segment(s) exists for the innovation. When pursuing a product innovation approach,
marketers must ensure that they have a varied and multi-tiered approach to product
innovation. Many firms, such as research and development focused companies,
successfully focus on product innovation.
A relatively new form of marketing uses the Internet and is called Internet marketing
or more generally e-marketing, affiliate marketing, desktop advertising or online
marketing. It typically tries to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional
marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized
marketing or one-to-one marketing.
5. Marketing Planning
5.1. The marketing planning process
A marketing plan outlines the specific actions intend to carry out to interest potential
customers and clients in product and/or service and persuade them to buy the product
and/or services we offer.
Behind the corporate objectives, which in themselves offer the main context for the
marketing plan, will lay the 'corporate mission'; which in turn provides the context
for these corporate objectives. This `corporate mission' can be thought of as a
definition of what the organization is; of what it does: 'Our business is …'.
When we are thinking for a product following things should be taking into
consideration.
1. Financial data --Facts for this section will come from management
accounting, costing and finance sections.
2. Product data --From research and development.
3. Advertising, sales promotion, merchandising data - Information from these
departments.
One more aspect of strategy which is often overlooked is that of 'timing'. Exactly
when it is the best time for each element of the strategy to be implemented is often
critical. Taking right decision at right time will help for a business.
Having completed this crucial stage of the planning process, we need to re-check the
feasibility of company objectives and strategies in terms of the sales, costs, profits
and so on which these demand in practice.
Clear – They should be clear and should know exactly what is to be done.
Quantified - The predicted outcome of each activity should be, as far as possible,
quantified; so that its performance can be monitored.
Focused - The temptation to proliferate activities beyond the numbers which can be
realistically controlled should be avoided.
Agreed - Those who are to implement them should be committed to them, and agree
that they are achievable.
The final stage of any marketing planning process is to establish targets so that
progress can be monitored. Accordingly, it is important to put both quantities and
timescales into the marketing objective.
The most important elements of marketing performance, which are normally tracked,
are:
Sales analysis
Company should review the sales of the company and then investigating detailed
problems, then investigates the individual elements (individual products, sales
territories, customers and so on) which are failing to meet targets.
Expense analysis
The key ratio to watch in this area is usually the `marketing expense to sales ratio;
although this may be broken down into other elements (advertising to sales, sales
administration to sales, and so on).
Financial Analysis
The `bottom line' of marketing activities should at least in theory, be the net profit (for
all except non-profit organizations, where the comparable emphasis may be on
remaining within budgeted costs). There are a number of separate performance
figures and key ratios which need to be tracked:
The above performance analyses concentrate on the quantitative measures which are
directly related to short-term performance. But there are a number of indirect
measures, essentially tracking customer attitudes, which can also indicate the
organization's performance in terms of its longer-term marketing strengths and may
accordingly be even more important indicators. Some useful measures are:
• market research - including customer panels (which are used to track changes
over time)
• lost business - the projects which were given before and taken back
• customer complaints - how many customers complain about the products or
services
So when the organization goes with a certain marketing plan then it would be better to
check out the profits and the performance of the company as well as employees.
6. Software Product Marketing
Website is the most important piece of marketing that have to develop. It should be
distinctive should reflect professional image. Website should be like to build brand
and create a customer-focused website - one that keeps visitors coming back! And it
should be simple and fully functional ecommerce site.
Put business on the fast track using web promotion products and services.
Web Developer that sells software online, here are the basic software marketing
methods that will help to boost the sales.
Maintaining a high ranking in the most important search websites is a never ending
struggle, as we need to follow certain rules and continuously update and optimize the
website.
Focus on:
Improving link popularity
Adding fresh content
Monitoring website results
Spending time in improving the design and the usability of website.
Pay attention to where we get from these sites and invest time in those who really
bring us customers. One of the main advantages of submitting software to download
sites is obtaining more back-links and increased link popularity, which enhance your
website's page ranking. It is one of the most important software marketing techniques.
There is a vast network of affiliates on the internet. Affiliates are people who
will promote and sell software products from their websites, in return of a small
commission for every sale. So if we choose those who have websites that have been
specially designed to sell software products then our sales will be increased.
Important search place ads near search results in return of a small amount. It is called
pay per click advertising. The idea behind this marketing technique is to bid for
relevant "keywords" that bring pertinent results related to the product you're selling,
and place your advertisement on the top of the page. The most important players on
this market are Google AdWords and Yahoo!Search.
A good article has to look professional. The golden rule is to come up with a catchy
headline and pay special attention to the content. Avoid duplicating information found
on the internet. Article must be simple, meaningful and original. Keep a professional
tone and avoid self-promotion.
Sign articles; add contact information and a copyright note at the end of the editorial.
Also include a line with website's address for those who might be interested in the
subject that we presented and would like to find out more about work.
Online communities may help us to increase brand awareness, traffic, gain good back
links. We can start by creating bookmarklets to insert into articles, whitepapers, press
releases and any other page that visitors might catalog as useful information. Visitors
will have the chance to recommend, telling others about us and in the end this will
lead to increasing popularity.
Deliver what market wants and needs by capturing the voice of the market on an
ongoing, iterative basis, evaluating and scoring ideas, and translating them into
actionable plans.
The Accept Portfolio Management module improves visibility and control throughout
the innovation process, empowering to manage R&D investments more effectively.
Powerful market-driven strategy planning and analytics help ensure maximum
portfolio value and strategic alignment. With Accept Portfolio Management, we can:
6.3.3. Ideation
Engage everyone
Prioritize with certainty
Transform ideas into winning products
6.4. Foundation
The Accept Innovation Foundation links the capabilities of Accepts three modules –
Ideation, Portfolio Management, and Product Development. It provides three core
capabilities that improve team and individual productivity and deliver visibility for all
participants.
• Collaboration
• Business Intelligence
• Requirements Management
Now everyone from executives to the entire product team can benefit from a single
system of record that captures all market, competitive, and requirements data in one
place, giving you visibility at every stage of the innovation process.
6.4.1. Collaboration
Break down organizational silos, so you can mobilize resources around innovation
and foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. You’re also empowered to
proactively collaborate beyond the enterprise with customers, partners, and suppliers.
Accept enables you to leverage analytics so you can evaluate alternatives, optimize
plans, and prioritize investments.
Increasing sales
Non-domestic sales is one way of increasing sales potential; it expands the "pie" that
can earn money from, otherwise we will stuck trying to make money only out of the
local market. While the local market may represent enough sales potential for smaller
firms, for medium and larger companies the local market is just too small and the
only way to expand sales is to go for non-domestic sales.
It should be said, however, if we are not yet selling regionally and nationally,
then we should first aiming at expanding market share within the local market. Once
we saturated the national market, then we look beyond the borders of country. It has
been said that there are no sales barrier that automatically begins where border ends.
Increased sales also impact upon profitability (although not always positively),
productivity by lowering unit costs, and may increase firm's perceived size and
stature, thereby affecting its competitive position compared with other similar-sized
organizations.
Increasing profits
Companies generally strive to make profits and the bigger the profits the better. In
many instances, non-domestic sales can contribute to increased profits because the
average orders from international customers are often larger than domestic buyers.
Some products - especially those that are unique or very innovative in nature may
also command greater profit margins abroad than in the local market.
It is risky being bound to the domestic market alone. Non-domestic sales to a variety
of diverse foreign markets can help reduce the risk that the company may be exposed
to because of fluctuations in local (and foreign) business cycles. At any one time, the
UK, Australia and Germany will be enjoying different growth rates.
Economies of scale
It is not uncommon for a recession in the local market to act as a spur for companies
to enter non-domestic markets that may offer greater opportunities for sales. While
this may have the benefit of offering ongoing sales potential for the firm in question,
the danger with this approach is that when the local market improves, these
companies abandon their non-domestic markets to focus on the now buoyant local
market.
Untapped markets
A company may have a very unique product that is not yet available elsewhere in the
world. In this instance, these untapped markets are likely to drive the firm's non-
domestic activities. Other firms may want to take advantage of high-volume
purchases in large markets overseas, such as in the US, Europe and Asia.
6.5.2. The various drawbacks of non-domestic sales
Of course, there are also potential pitfalls in non-domestic sales. They include the
following:
Delivering high quality software is a stated goal of many development teams and it is
a very admirable goal. To reach this goal we need to decide what "high quality" really
means and we need to have some clue about how to achieve it?
We can define external quality as the level a software product achieves for the
following factors:
Therefore, we can define the internal quality of a piece of software as its level of and
relative balance between the following factors:
• Elegance - is the design and code as simple as possible but not so simple that
it does not do the job well?
• Efficiency - does it avoid unnecessary overuse of resources?
• Comprehensibility - is the design and code easy to understand?
• Flexibility - can it be easily adapted to do things differently?
• Compliance - does it conform to documented, agreed standards, patterns and
best practices?
Initially a piece of software with low internal quality may exhibit high external
quality. However, unless the internal quality is improved, the external quality is
bound to eventually suffer as developers try to fix bugs and add new features over
time. This is where restructuring becomes truly useful.
• The later a problem is identified then the higher the likelihood that work based
on it has been added. That work will need to be rechecked and maybe redone.
• The later a problem is identified, the more groups of people involved and the
more administrative process required to have it fixed.
• The longer the distance between introducing a defect and identifying it, the
higher the level of frustration, irritation and resistance of developers. They
have to go back to designs and source code they thought was finished long
ago and rework it.
The following are some proven strategies for the early detection of problems in
internal and external quality.
The use of peer reviews, walkthroughs or inspections can significantly shorten the
distance between the introduction of defects and their detection. When done well,
inspections find more defects than testing and also find different defects than testing.
In contrast to testing, inspections improve the internal quality of software by
examining the analysis, design and source code.
Communicate design clearly at all levels of abstraction using the most appropriate
means of communication: text, lists, tables and/or pictures.
The product revenue and profits can be plotted as a function of the life-cycle stages as
shown in the graph below:
Growth Stage
In the growth stage, the firm seeks to build brand preference and increase market
share.
Product quality is maintained and additional features and support services may be
added.
Pricing is maintained as the firm enjoys increasing demand with little competition.
Distribution channels are added as demand increases and customers accept the
product.
Promotion is aimed at a broader audience.
Maturity Stage
At maturity, the strong growth in sales diminishes. Competition may appear with
similar products. The primary objective at this point is to defend market share while
maximizing profit.
Product features may be enhanced to differentiate the product from that of
competitors.
Pricing may be lower because of the new competition.
Distribution becomes more intensive and incentives may be offered to encourage
preference over competing products.
Promotion emphasizes product differentiation.
Decline Stage