Geneviève Masson, eng. PhD,
Mechanical engineer, Doctorate from Université de Sherbrooke, she has 20 years’ experience in R&D and product development. Passionate about systems optimization, she integrates innovative solutions to meet technical challenges and improve process efficiency.
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Are you really in tune with your customers’ expectations ? Do you know whether your product really meets their needs and desires ? Or are you struggling to identify the market trends that will make the difference in your product development project ?
In-depth market knowledge is essential for developing a product that meets your customers’ real expectations. Companies that excel in this approach position themselves advantageously and increase their chances of success, because they align their offering with the needs, desires and trends of their target audience.
Unfortunately, this crucial step, known as the conceptual study, is often omitted or carried out too quickly. However, it comes into play upstream of the Product Development Process (PDP) and can make all the difference between a successful product and one that goes unnoticed.
Figure 1: Classic Product Development Process.
In this article, Merkur’s Director of Product Development Geneviève Masson, eng. phD, explains why conceptual design is essential to the success of your product development projects and maximizes your chances of success.
READ ALSO: Why is Value Analysis’ Crucial to Product Development?
1. Why Knowing your Market is Essential
Even a technically perfect product is doomed to failure if it doesn’t meet the expectations of its target market. Here are a few reasons why market knowledge is essential:
- Meeting customer needs: Understanding what customers are looking for and what motivates them to buy is fundamental. This enables us to design products that truly meet their expectations.
- Reducing risks: A good understanding of the market helps minimize uncertainties. By analyzing buying behavior and identifying market segments, you can anticipate potential challenges.
- Optimizing resources: Investing wisely in features that add real value is crucial. This avoids wasting resources on features that don’t meet customer needs.
Market segmentation is also a key aspect. By dividing the market into segments according to criteria such as age, gender, geographical location or purchasing habits, you can tailor product development to each specific group. This not only enables you to target customers more effectively, but also to position yourself as a specialist in a given field.
“Thanks to this step, you can understand your customers’ true expectations. This will transform your approach to product development and inevitably increase your customers’ satisfaction.”
2. Carry out a Competitive and Patent Analysis
In a market that is often saturated, knowing which players are already present is essential to stand out. Competitive analysis helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of competing products, so you can avoid repeating their mistakes. Here are some key points to consider :
- Functionality benchmarking: Which features work well with competitors? Which ones are failing? This analysis enables you to identify best practices and innovate.
- Price positioning: Where does your product stand in relation to others? Understanding competitors’ pricing strategies helps define a competitive strategy.
- Communication strategies: How do competitors interact with their customers? Analyzing their marketing campaigns can provide valuable insights into what works.
At the same time, an analysis of patents is essential to understand the technological landscape of the sector. By studying existing patents, a company can identify solutions already proposed and anticipate any technical or legal constraints. This ensures that the product developed will be truly innovative and differentiated, while respecting intellectual property rights.
3. Understanding Market Trends and Consumers
Market trends evolve rapidly, influenced by cultural, economic and technological factors. Keeping abreast of new trends is crucial to designing a product in line with current expectations. Here are a few ways to achieve this :
- Market reports: These documents provide detailed analyses of current and future trends, enabling companies to adapt quickly.
- Discussions on social networks: Social platforms provide a wealth of information on consumer opinions and preferences. Analyzing these discussions can provide valuable insights.
- Surveys and interviews: These methods make it possible to ask questions directly to potential customers, providing an in-depth understanding of their specific needs.
- Newsgroups: Organizing focus groups enables us to explore consumers’ opinions on a product or concept in depth.
By conducting this research, you can develop products that don’t just fill a superficial need, but really resonate with their target market.
4. Writing Functional Specifications
Once the market has been carefully studied, the next step is to draw up a functional specification. This document structures and formalizes the requirements to be met by the product, based on the expectations of the target market. A good specification should:
- Define basic functionality: What are the product’s essential features?
- Take technical constraints into account: What technical limitations must be respected?
- Setting performance targets: What are the expected results in terms of performance and customer satisfaction?
Functional specifications serve as a guide for development teams, ensuring that each stage of the process remains aligned with market needs. By clearly structuring expectations, it facilitates subsequent iterations and contributes to fluid communication between the various stakeholders.
5. Use the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Once the specifications have been drawn up, the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) becomes an invaluable tool for validating hypotheses with the market, with minimal investment. The MVP concept consists of launching a prototype or a simplified version of the product to quickly gather market feedback, thus enabling the product-market fit to be tested without having to invest all the development effort from the outset.
Based on early feedback, you can fine-tune key features and discard those that don’t provide real value. The MVP is a pragmatic way of validating the relevance of a product before a wider launch. It is often following this stage that the product idea will move from the conceptual study stage to preliminary engineering (i.e. from Phase 2 to Phase 3 of the Product Development Process).
6. Collaborate Internally to Improve Product-Market Fit
Good market knowledge requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Marketing, sales and product development teams need to work in synergy to get the full picture. For example:
- Marketing can provide insights into market trends.
- Sales can share valuable customer feedback.
This collaboration is crucial to ensure that the product meets the company’s overall objectives, and to quickly identify any production or distribution challenges. By working together, teams can avoid costly mistakes and ensure that the final product meets market expectations.
“Investing time and resources in market research before launching a product is a proven way of ensuring that your offering is not only relevant, but also competitive. Ultimately, market knowledge is the key to innovation and commercial success.”
Conclusion: Knowing your Market, the Key to Successful Product Development
Knowing your market is essential for any company wishing to maximize the chances of success for its product. This knowledge involves in-depth customer analysis, precise segmentation, competitor evaluation and continuous adaptation to trends. By adopting a consumer-centric approach, you can develop products that create real added value, while avoiding the pitfalls and risks of failure.
Our Merkur product development experts, with their knowledge of markets, customers and products, will support you in this essential step. Contact us.
