Managing Products

In the Product Decisions Tutorial, we showed that marketers are confronted with many issues when building the product component of their marketing strategy.  While product decisions represent just one aspect of marketer’s overall activities, these decisions are often the most important because they lead directly to the reasons (i.e., benefits offered, solutions to problems) for why the customer decides to choose the organization’s goods, services or ideas.

In this part of our Principles of Marketing Tutorials we extend the coverage of product decisions by exploring additional product issues facing the marketer.  In particular, we examine four important areas.  First, we categorize the roles played by those involved in product management and show how the scope of a manager’s responsibilities changes as these roles take on greater importance.  Second, we return to a discussion of branding by focusing on overall branding strategies that may be adopted by the marketing organization.  Third, we spend a large part of this tutorial covering the importance of new product development including an analysis of the steps firms may follow to bring new products to market.  Finally, we will see that once new products have been established in the market numerous factors force the marketer to continually adjust their product decisions.