Abstract

The article focuses on new product planning in an age of future consciousness. As industrial, trade and consumer purchasers become increasingly more receptive to progress and newness, a shortened product life cycle necessitates the firm's continuous active review of its market offerings with a view toward product additions, modifications and deletions. The marketing manager is constantly striving to anticipate and understand the buyer's wants and needs to develop and maintain a product line that fulfills those requirements, to price it in accordance with perceived benefits and to promote and distribute it so that potential customers can learn about it and obtain it. Appropriately, product planning has been defined as a function of management concerned with the forward development of a company taking existing assets or resources as the first premise and relating or adapting them through an evolving, product policy to emerging market needs. A diminishing slope of the growth segment of the product's life cycle signals the need for new product planning. But product newness means different things to different companies.