The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

32.1. Introduction

After the long months (or in some cases years) of development, having survived the perils of prelaunch consumer testing (see Chapter 18) and the seemingly endless treacheries of internal politics (see Chapter 10), the product may finally be launched into the marketplace. In an ideal world, previous research will already have ensured that a genuine consumer need exists for the product (or service), and consumer testing will have proven that the new product delivers successfully on that need. In reality, though, even with the most thorough prelaunch research program, the marketer inevitably faces many more unknowns than knowns when he/she launches a new product. (See Table 32.1 and Chapter 30) In this chapter, we describe the process of designing a program to assess the new product's performance in the marketplace as soon as possible after launch, to tell the team and company management: (1) how well the product is doing; and, more important, (2) where its performance needs improvement if the sales prognosis is not good.