Effective Product Strategy

Businesses looking to make upgrades in their product pipelines resort to various initiatives, including researching customer spending data, to identify nascent consumption trends. They also engineer a sound product strategy to make sure top leadership's business vision aligns with customers' needs and wants. Marketing specialists often split product strategy into two work streams: upstream and downstream.

Upstream Strategy

An upstream strategy looks at various factors affecting product design, presentation, maintenance and upgrade requirements. This action plan focuses on coming up with the best product or service that customers will appreciate and relish. In the corporate setting, an upstream strategy calls for the expertise and technical acumen of research-and-development (R&D) engineers, market researchers and regulatory-compliance supervisors. Compliance personnel weigh in on upstream-plan discussions to ensure that corporate products do not run afoul of the law or violate copyright regulations.

Downstream Strategy

A downstream strategy comes into play once a company has manufactured a product and is ready to market it. In this blueprint, corporate management puts into place procedures aimed at setting prices, finding distribution outlets and crafting adequate promotion campaigns. The objective here is to convey production outputs from corporate warehouses to shopping centers at cost-effective rates, all this while increasing customer satisfaction without losing money. Downstream-strategy implementation success requires the active participation of salespeople, marketing personnel and logistics specialists.

Relevance

Product-strategy formulation and implementation enable a company to monitor other items that rivals sell in the marketplace and to mimic the best that rivals are offering, with respect to quality and innovation. Emulating competitors' achievements and improving them is distinct from copyright violation; economists call that process "benchmarking." By raising product quality across the board, companies ultimately provide better goods and services to clients.

Tools

Businesses use a host of tools, including "killer applications," to come up with products that are affordable and resonate well with customers. Given that technology plays center stage in the modern business environment, having state-of-the-art equipment helps fuel corporate growth and improve productivity. The tools of the trade include enterprise resource planning software, customer relationship management programs, process re-engineering software and defect-tracking applications. A killer application, or "killer app," is a computer application that surpasses all its rivals, especially when it comes to product-strategy formulation and implementation.

Personnel Involvement

Various personnel help a company develop product-strategy formulation into a broader, more important discipline. By doing so, they enable the firm to view product-related blueprints through a profitability lens and to consider these action plans as foundational to its business. Professionals such as R&D engineers, marketing strategists, market researchers and salespeople play a key role in helping a firm develop an effective product strategy. Finance personnel, including accountants and corporate treasurers, also pitch in product-strategy formulation.

References

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-2011 Edition: Industrial Production Managers
• Online Business Advisor: Use Market Research To Gain A Competitive Advantage
• Robert Winton: Develop A Product Marketing Strategy
• Pragmatic Marketing: Product Strategy Doesn't Just Happen
• Ian Traynor: Product Life Cycles -- Developing Your Product Strategy
• NPD-Solutions: Product Development Strategic Orientation