2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

HOW THE CHICKEN CROSSED THE ROAD: THE MARKETING-PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT INTERFACE
Bill Dodds, Fort Lewis College, School of Business Administration,
Durango, CO 81301; dodds_b@fortlewis.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper connects the creative energies of
marketing with product design and development in
the discovery and satisfaction of customer needs to
create better and faster value for customers than do
competitors, and solidify a strong relationship with
customers. A vital role of marketing in the product
design and development process is to bring in
knowledge of consumer behavior, business analysis
and marketing research to identify and translate
consumer needs into potentially viable
product/service concepts which can be shaped into
value added products through effective cost-quality
tradeoffs.
INTRODUCTION
This paper positions the importance of innovation in
product design and development for demonstrating
how firms “cross the road” to get from discovering
customer needs to satisfying needs. If marketing is
centered on the ability of a firm to discover and
satisfy customer needs then it becomes imperative
to explore the linkage between these two activities.
The practice of innovation, design and development
is an eclectic mix of structural processes embodied
in a creative environment. The challenge in this
process is that understanding customers’ needs is
often a costly and inexact process. Even when
customers know what they want, they often cannot
verbalize that information clearly or completely
(Thomke & von Hippel, 2002). This suggests that the
“need” resides with the customer while the “solution”
resides with the firm.
The shift towards a more creative economy has
been underway for some time. Apple has been the
paragon of the creative corporation. Companies
throughout the world are deconstructing Apple’s
success in design and innovation, and learning the
lessons (Nussbaum, 2005). At the core (no pun
intended) of Apple’s success are very sound
principles that would define many of the leading
edge companies that churn out innovative and needsatisfying
products. Identifying new product
opportunities by successfully translating customer
needs into product requirements and developing a
product from that concept into mainstream success
is the defining mark of an innovative, customeroriented
company like Apple. Marketing is at the
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center of this process as firms engage in the
discovery-satisfaction process to create better and
faster value for the customer than do their
competitors and solidify a strong relationship with
their customers as well as their channel partners.
The reader might muse about the paper’s title, How
the Chicken Crossed the Road. While the age-old
question of why the chicken crossed the road elicits
a multitude of diverse and often amusing answers, I
am writing to describe how the chicken crossed the
road. In short, I would suggest very fast, with a plan
in mind but with enough creativity to adjust the plan
as more information is discovered. In today’s
competitive environment, a firm’s marketing task is
to translate customer needs into need-satisfying
products. Like the chicken, firms need to “cross the
road” in the same manner: quickly, with a plan, but
with enough creativity to capitalize on the
information they gain in “crossing the road.”
The interconnectedness between marketing and
product design and development is illustrated in
FIGURE 1
Marketing-Development Interface:
Moving from Abstract Customer Needs
to Concrete Products
----------Marketing-Development Interface -----------
Marketer’s First Task:
Discover Customer Needs
Identify
Customer
Needs
Generate
Product
Concepts
????????????
Select
Product
Concept(s)
Test
Product
Concept(s)
Marketer’s Second Task:
Satisfy Customer Needs
Sources: Kerin, Hartley, & Rudelius 2006, Ulrich & Eppinger,
2004
Design