Given the rapid changes in consumer tastes, technology and competition, companies must develop a steady stream of new products to satisfy this wants and needs of the consumer, however, this product are vulnerable to change to consumer needs, new technology, short life cycle, increase domestic and foreign competition and new technologies seems to be the most threatening.
New products are essential to the success of any company that fails to develop new products is exposed to great risk. this risk may come in form of competition, change in consumer taste and technology.
To succeed every company must develop new products, new products are developed to replace out-dated ones. these new products falls into three categories which are: products that are truly innovative, products that may be considered replacement for existing products, but which are significantly different from existing product and product that are new to a particular company.
However, this new products continue to fail at a very disturbing rate example is “satzenbrau”. This failure might be due to overestimated market size, ill design products, incorrect positioning products, product not advertise effectively, failure to gain distribution cost and competitions counter attack and so on. All these failure rates have rekindle the anxiousness of companies to improve their odds of new products one way is to identify successful product and find out what they have in common. Another is to study new product failures to see what to be learnt and yet another is to embark on continuous replacement of existing product. (brands).
Various studies suggest that new product success depends on developing a unique superior products; one with higher quality new feature and higher value, another is a well defined product concept prior to development in which the company carefully assess the market product if they must stay in bussiness but the odd weight heavily against their success thus the solution lies in setting up a systematic product planning and development strategy and this is what the researcher tends to highlight using of Guinness Nigeria Plc as a case study.
1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
Due to acute competition in the breweries in industry, brewery firms have renewed their interest in marketing by focusing on the production of what it can sell rather than what it can make. The problem to be address in this research is to examine high rate of product failure in the market that is bedeviling manufacturing organization.
1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The specific objectives are:
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The following research questions are derived from the objectives.
1.5 RESEARCH HYPOTHESES
Hypotheses I
H 0
H 1
Hypotheses II
H 0
H 1
1.6 SIGNIFICANT OF THE STUDY
The result emanating from this research work will be useful to the following: investors, Guinness Nigeria Plc, the research and the student of Business Administration Department.
Since product planning and development strategy is the major function of manufacturing organization it is relevant therefore to undertake such study since they constitute the main objective which is the production of quality good, the survival of the business rest on efficient implementation of product planning and development.
1.7 THE SCOPE OF STUDY
This research work is directed to the study of product planning and development strategies in a brewery industry. This topic will be trailed down to Guinness Nigeria Plc, Benin Ikpoba Hill, Benin City.
1.8 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY
Factors that militate against the research work involves:
1.9 DEFINITIONS OF TERMS:
Products: It is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, usage or consumption that might satisfy a want or need includes physical objects services, persons, organization and ideas.
New Product: A good service or product that is perceived by some customers as new.
Product Planning; This embraces all activities that enables a company to determine what products it will market.
Product Concept: The idea that consumers will favour products that offers the most quality, performance and feature.
Product Ideas: An idea for a possible product that the company can see itself offering to the market
Product Image: The way consumers perceive an actual or potential products
Product Line: A group of products that are closely related, because they function in similar manner, and are sold to the same customer group are marketed through the same types of outlets of falls within the given price range.
Product Development: A strategy for company growth by offering modified or new products to current market segment, Developing the production in order to ensure that the product idea can be formed into workable product.
New Product Development: The development of original products, improvement, produces modifications and new brand through the firm’s own research and development effort.
Strategy: A comprehensive description of an organization master plan for achieving objectives and purpose.