MIT Sloan Management Review

Trade promotions permit manufacturers to influence retail price, retail sales, and total channel profit by rewarding resellers for lower prices and subsidizing their selling effort.

A three-step process to ensure that companies launch new products that make a profit and please customers.

In the continuous battle for strategic supremacy, leaders and challengers must control the patterns of turbulence and select an appropriate method for creating wealth.

How Toyota’s product design and development process helps find the best solutions and develop successful products.

A combination of efforts — technology licensing, defense of intellectual property, and judicious partnerships —helped firms protect profits and remain competitive.

A platform is a collection of components, processes, knowledge, people, and relationships shared by a set of products, allowing companies to efficiently develop differentiated products and to better meet customer needs. The authors describe the benefits and challenges of platform planning, presenting three underlying ideas, a method for planning a new product platform, and recommendations for managing the process.

After calculating the risks of introducing a new product, companies must choose a primary strategy, monitor market conditions, and adopt a contingency strategy if necessary.

The contention that loyal customers are always more profitable is a gross simplification, according to the authors. They posit that such schemes do not fundamentally alter market structure and, instead, increase market expenditures without really creating any extra brand loyalty. Dowling and Uncles suggest ways to design an effective program.

The failure to integrate a product strategy, a well-planned portfolio, and a facilitating organization structure with clearly identified customer needs, a well-defined product concept, and a project plan can severely hamper new product development. An examination of eleven companies aims at improving the effectiveness of the front-end process.