This paper examines the product design and renewal process through the lens of a cosmetics manufacturing company seeking to expand its body care product line. It outlines the sequential stages of new product development — from market prospecting and fundamental research to prototype creation, testing, and market launch — and discusses creativity methods, product selection criteria, and technical shaping considerations. The paper also evaluates performance objectives across maintenance, improvement, and innovative categories, and assesses the operation using organizing and control as evaluation criteria. The analysis reveals a tension between the long-term nature of product design and the short-term performance targets set by company management.
The process of creating new products requires the existence of a product renewal process plan. This plan should start with an analysis of the strategic situation the company intends to benefit from, relying on the company's general objectives system, developing specific marketing objectives, and culminating in the generation of new product ideas. The entire plan emphasizes the sequential and continuous character of the renewal process.
This operation is based entirely on generating new product ideas, which relies on research and development activity supported by analysis of the product line's life cycle and estimation of its future evolution on the market. Theory states that every product has five structuring levels, which can be represented in a diagram showing the layered attributes from core benefit to potential product.
As an illustrative case, this paper analyzes a cosmetics manufacturing company that is trying to develop a new product in order to enlarge its body care product line. Manufacturing a new product requires a well-determined organizational framework and a clear overview of the steps that must be followed. The performance objectives for this stage are the correct succession of these steps and strict adherence to the period of time allowed for each step. Attaining these objectives will determine the product's future commercial success.
In order to manufacture the new cosmetic product, the company must follow these sequential steps:
Prospecting the market's dimension, structure, and dynamics. This analysis will reveal both the existing market and the potential one, so that the company can decide whether it is more convenient to continue in this market or to move on to other unexploited markets. The analysis will also reveal niches that the company can exploit by creating new products to address them.
Fundamental research. This step involves the actual research into new product ideas. After evaluation, only the products best suited to the company's capabilities and strategy will be selected.
Technological research. After selecting the new product to be manufactured, specialists begin working on its technical attributes. This stage is fundamental to the new product's commercial future.
Generating the new product and its components. This is the stage when the new product comes to life and is no longer merely an idea.
Testing the new product. After the prototype is manufactured, it must be tested from both the technical and acceptability points of view.
Homologation of the product by certified organisms.
Distributing the product in preparation for its future launch.
The actual launching of the product. Generally, launching refers to the long and complex process that begins with the idea of a new product and has as its final objective the assessment of the new product's reception on the market.
Controlling the product's launch and studying how the product is received by customers.
In the cosmetics company's case, the new product idea will be realized through the industrial design process. Design is a creative activity whose aim is to establish the multi-faceted qualities of objects, processes, services, and their systems across whole life cycles. Therefore, design is the central factor of innovative humanization of technologies and the crucial factor of cultural and economic exchange (Wikipedia, 2007).
The cosmetic products market is highly developed worldwide. It is dominated by large enterprises with long traditions and significant results generated by their research and development activities. It is very difficult for smaller companies to survive and compete in this market. The company in this case is attempting to compete with these large firms by creating a new body care product. In order to develop a competitive product that can stand up to others on the market, the company must invest serious amounts of money, time, and creativity in its product research. Given that the cosmetics market is very mature and existing products already address most customer needs, it is particularly difficult to come up with an entirely new and innovative product — which is why creativity is so important to the product design operation.
Creativity is understood as a result of both imagination and systematic search techniques and methods for new ideas. It requires initiative, imagination, perseverance, and a methodical spirit, among other qualities. There are several creativity methods for the company to choose from: attributes listing, enforced relations technique, morphological analysis, operational creativity, brainstorming, synectics, or brain-writing (Erlendsson).
In this company's case, the best-suited creativity method is attribute listing. This method consists of stimulating ideas that generate new products by listing an existing product's characteristics and then finding ways to change them in order to obtain products with superior, improved quality. This approach would allow the company's researchers to develop new, enhanced products based on existing ones.
The ideas generated in the creativity stage must then pass through successive selection processes in order to eliminate variants that do not meet the requirements for the new product. In this stage, ideas are confronted with restrictions imposed by the human, financial, and material potential of the company, by market requirements, and by the need to ensure profitability. When establishing the selection criteria list, the company must take into consideration the nature of the new product and the specific need it is intended to address. After evaluation, variants that do not achieve high acceptance coefficients are eliminated.
The criteria that the new product must correspond to are organized into three categories:
Technical: The new product's performance must conform to expected functional, durability, maintenance, ergonomic, and aesthetic requirements. The company must also determine whether its resources satisfy the requirements imposed by the new product regarding materials, accessories, technological manufacturing possibilities, machinery, and the necessary human capital.
Economic and financial: The company must decide whether its resources meet requirements regarding specific material consumption, profitability level, and ecological obligations. It must also determine whether its financial resources can cover the expenses of new technology, the acquisition of new machinery, and any supplementary workforce.
Marketing: The company must decide whether the new product aligns with its marketing strategy regarding market positioning, competitive capacity, and brand image. The new product must also meet customer requirements regarding novelty level, price accessibility, and competitive advantage. The market conditions allow the company to estimate the product's life cycle, gain new customer segments, and attain the forecasted profitability.
"Prototype development, packaging, naming, testing, and launch"
"Maintenance, improvement, and innovative performance targets"
"Control and organizing criteria applied to product design"
The operation design model presented above is a positive example of product and service design. The design presented above is a very well-structured process, containing all the steps that need to be followed in order to create new products and ensure their future commercial success. The product design process is a very long and substantial one, engaging large amounts of time, financial resources, and human resources. However, its success is based on its complexity: the more comprehensive and well-structured it is, the greater its chances of success.
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