Product Planning

Chapter 5

Concept Generation

• Generate a bunch of ideas, pick out the few good ones, and toss out the rest!

• Six main techniques for generating concepts

Creativity

• About 4% of people are “highly creative”

• Creativity, per Maslow, is correlated with “the ability to withstand the lack of structure, the lack of future, lack of predictability, of control, the tolerance for ambiguity, for planlessness”

Product Concept Statement

• Foundation for further development effort

• Three elements of a product concept statement– Form– Technology– Benefit

• Benefit is the most important – customers buy benefit, not form or technology

Concept Generation Techniques

• Six major techniques to generate ideas1. Needs assessment – what does the customer need

2. Scenario analysis – where do trends take us

3. Group creativity – getting creative people together

4. Attribute analysis – very mechanical approach

5. Relationship analysis – look for new connections

6. Lateral research – look sideways at the product

Needs Assessment

• Understanding marketplace needs – customer pain points

• McQuarrie’s seven step methodology to do this (listed on pages 70-71)

• Can also use experts or publications or market research companies (I prefer the latter)

• Ethnography, role playing, asking your employees, lead user analysis

Scenario Analysis

• Extend approach and leap approach

• Extend takes current trends and stretches them into the future

• Leap begins in the future and paints a picture of what that future looks like

Group Creativity

• Brainstorming is commonly used

• Delphi approach also used

• New techniques are evolving– Consumer-centric innovation– Ideation– Sentence completion– Personification

Attribute Analysis

• Look at product characteristics to generate new ideas

• Three typical approaches– Determinant gap analysis – attributes are known, key

drivers are extended; attribute rating (AR) approach – Perceptual gap analysis – attributes are not known or

not easily identified; used paired comparisons and create perceptual map; overall similarity (OS) approach

– Similarity/dissimilarity analysis – concepts evaluated on similarity or dissimilarity to each other; can use cluster analysis for this type of work

Relationship Analysis

• Forces examination of relationships between unrelated issues to find ideas

• Three main techniques– Two-dimensional matrix – Identify two key

elements and generate new ideas– Morphological analysis – Identify different

levels of attributes and compare different combinations (conjoint models used here)

– Analogies – proxies that are similar to the product

Lateral Search

• Attempt to create “out of the box” thinking

• Four main techniques in this area– Competitor review – what are they doing– Avoidance technique – challenging ideas– Big Winner technique – iterate reasons why

the consumers like the product area– Creative stimuli technique – for a given noun

or adjective, brainstorm ideas