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Market research is the upstream process Marketing is different from promoting and selling in both function and in time. Market research is the upstream process before the product is ready, perhaps before committing engineering. Marketing means designing the product to deliver benefits, and only those benefits, that customers are willing to spend money to receive, thus guiding engineering to design the right products. Marketing is defined as all pre-production market research and excludes all promotion and sales expenditures. It includes the primary and secondary market research that supports strategic planning. Marketing is also the quantification of customer needs, understanding the potential customer, developing business models, customer payback calculations, market segmentation, food-chain analysis, analyzing channels of distribution, and competitive intelligence. Market research not only vectors engineering to design the right products, but guides the promotion motion and the selling motion. For example, Varian Associates launched their 990-CLD Component Leak Detector in 1993 with an M/E Ratio™ of 4, investing in nine months of marketing before committing engineering. Although the helium leak detector is a half-century old instrument, Varian’s marketing effort surfaced the "voice of the customer" to define and create an entirely new market segment, the component leak detector. Marketing developed explicit lists of what engineering should design, and of what engineering should not design. Armed with definitive guidance from marketing, engineering completed the product in nineteen days. Varian Vacuum Products’ Peter Frasso proclaimed, "This is a super success! We created a whole new product category, and dominate that market to this day. The component leak detector business never existed before 1993, but now represents a significant and growing fraction of all our leak detector revenue. Marketing is very cost effective."
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