Issues relating to socially responsible product decisions?

 Social responsibility
 Regulations
 Laws
Consumer injury
 International arena
 Standard product & Adaptive product

In current business world social responsibility is a hot topic as governments, customers, activists and
other stakeholders are concerned about corporate social responsibility and asking & expecting
companies to perform their social responsibilities.

A company has to take decisions with regard to social responsibility and their product. Marketers should
carefully consider public policy issues and regulations regarding acquiring or dropping products, patent
protection, product quality and safety, and product warranties.

Product must be according to laws of a country regarding product quality and safety. These laws
protect the rights of stake holders and regulate business world. Companies dropping products must be
aware that they have legal obligations, written or implied, to their suppliers, dealers, and customers who
have a stake in the dropped product. Furthermore if consumers have been injured by a product with a
defective design, they can sue manufacturers or dealers. This results in a great loss for company.

These social responsibilities become more dynamic and complex as a company steps in international
market. First, they must figure out what products and services to introduce and in which countries.
Second marketers have to decide whether their product should be standardizes or adaptive. Also the
likes, culture and other social variables must be considered.

On the one hand, companies would like to standardize their offerings. Standardization helps a company
to standardized costs and offer a large variety of products. On the other hand, markets and consumers
around the world differ widely. Companies must usually respond to these differences by adapting their
product offerings.

Major consideration in managing the process of new product development ?

 Intro
 Customer-centered new product development
 Team-Based New Product Development
 Systematic New Product Development
There are approaches that a company must consider in the process of development of new product.
Only the 8 major steps of development, from idea to commercialization, are not enough rather
Companies must take a holistic approach to managing this process.

Customer-centered new product development

This approach focuses on finding new ways to solve

customer problems and create more customer-satisfying experiences. Knowing your customer and
choosing what kind of value your innovation will create and then sticking to that is critical.

Team-Based New Product Development

In the sequential process of product development, a

bottleneck at one phase can seriously slow an entire project. To tackle this disadvantage Team-Based
Product Development approach is used and if it combines with customer center approach it can provide
company a competitive edge.

Under this approach, company departments work closely together in cross-functional teams,
overlapping the steps in the product development process to save time and increase effectiveness.
Instead of passing the new product from department to department, the company assembles a team of
people from various departments that stay with the new product from start to finish. Such teams usually
include people from the marketing, finance, design, manufacturing, and legal departments and even
supplier and customer companies.

Systematic New Product Development

The new product development process should be holistic and

systematic rather than disjoint and haphazard. Otherwise, few new ideas will surface. To avoid these
problems, a company can install an innovation management system to collect, review, evaluate, and
manage new product ideas. Company can set up web-based idea management software or any other
similar system and encourage all company stakeholders—employees, suppliers, distributors, dealers—to
become involved in finding and developing new products.

The innovation management system approach yields two favorable outcomes. First, it helps create an
innovation-oriented company culture. Second, it will yield a larger number of new product ideas, among
which will be found some especially good ones. The good new ideas will be more systematically
developed, producing more new product successes.

By: MUHAMMAD SALMAN AHMAD

ROLL NO 19