Product Management [antikvár]

REFACE The focus of this book is on those individuals who have the primary responsibility for the market success of the company's products and services. In many companies, particularly packaged goods companies, this person has the title product manager. Although, as we note in Chapter 1, the title is not always the same, there are always individuals in the company who must be the "expert" for the product, someone to whom senior managers can assign responsibility for the execution of marketing plans and someone who advances or fails as a resuh of the product's performance. The product manager's job is becoming increasingly complex. Due to, among other things, changes in information technology, increasing global competition, changing customer needs and wants, the job of the product manager involves continually collecting and synthesizing information, forecasting changes in competition and market conditions, revising market strategies, and adapting decisions such as price and communications to rapidly changing market conditions. This is true even for so-called mature product categories. In the second edition of Product Management, we have attempted to cover the three major tasks facing product managers: 1. Analyzing the market. 2. Developing objectives and strategies for the product or service in question. 3. Making decisions about price, advertising, promotion, channels of distribution, and service. We use as a unifying framework the development of the marketing plan, a process that integrates the three tasks and provides a written record of the brand's history, prospects, and hopes.