Novelty Creations Markets

Case study : Novelty Creations markets

In respect to this case study, Novelty Creations markets a variety of lifestyle products including rainwears for dogs and cats, automatic odour protection device for bathrooms and ‘make-your-own’ birthday card kits. Also they markets outdoor collections including a range of garden lights in the shape of garden gnomes and self-erecting clothes dryers. They also offer personal items like nose-hair clippers, blood pressure monitors and earwax removal systems. The company is known for product development as they have sessions for generating ideas for new inventions, innovations and latest ventures every months. But for the past few months, Howard Boothroyd, the major shareholder of the company is disappointed and worried because their latest venture, an extended toenail clipper whereby a person could clip their toe nails without having to bend down, has been withdrawn from the brochure and the website after three unsuccessful months. Their ability to develop new products can help them as a growth strategy for their business but it also has the potential of being the decline stage of the business if the product development process is not handled correctly. In this case, there could be many factors behind the failure of their latest venture. Blinded by their own vision, the company ignored negative user feedback right from trials, and developed a product that failed to meet customers’ needs and wants or maybe they are targeting a wrong market. Incorrect pricing, weak team and internal capabilities, delayed market entry and poor execution could be one of the reasons.

Product Development

The success of product development efforts typically require considerable resources and the opportunity for lackluster results or outright failure are far higher than anyone will admit. Because of this high risk of failure, it is important to know why product development is important to companies and society. Product development is the life-blood of companies and societies. The product could be a physical product such as an automobile, smartphone, or coffee maker. It could also be services such as new IT solution, new manufacturing process, or a new real estate marketing concept. If a company handle it in the right way, successful product development actions would provide new value for customers, improved society and continued existence of the company. That’s what Novelty Creations are trying to do. But recently, the company is not doing well and the failure of their tenth recent new product has put the whole company into dilemma.

The company has some mistakes in the approach to new product development. Firstly, the company is lacking a customer value although this company has many products and always looking for new product ideas in order to produce more but the customers might not be interested in their products or as they launched their new extended toenail clipper, the customers might not feel that they need or want this product that’s why it failed to impress the customers. Before they decide to make any product, they should do some research as what kind of customers they are targeting and what kind of product would be suitable for them.

This company also lacks an important process which is a marketing research. Marketing research can help the company to know their marketing target or to know how the market is going on at that time such as what product that the customer need most or what the other competitors produce and how could they produce in order to compete with them. Without marketing research, the company might not be successful in their business because they might not know what their competitors are doing or what products their customers want and what group of customers they should focus on. Like in this case, when they decide and select the idea of the product which they are going produce, they produce it without any kind of research or consultation from the customers. Getting opinions and feedbacks from the customers are important as they would know what are their customers’ desires, what is lacking in their product and what should they improve.

Novelty’s Future New Products

There are thousands of products manufactured and launched every year. But the fact remains that the success rates of new product introductions and innovations have improved little over the last 20 years. Many of the products fail just within few years and many of the innovations fail to return their cost of capital(). This is due to a number of factors, including economic conditions, an explosion of consumer touch points, shifts in decision-making behavior, and the deluge of information marketers have to sift through to ensure they are up to speed with the latest trends and one of these factors could be the reason for the failure of Novelty’s latest venture. Even though Novelty Creations are running their business and have been in the market for quite some time, there are always new strategies that could help maximize their success rate in the marketplace and also to assure the success rate of their products in the future.

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