As a new product manager you have been asked to identify a suitable new product/service for you organisation. At this stage, your manager has requested an interim report which identifies a suitable opportunity and a recommended new product concept.

In your report include:

A brief description of the organisation and the market it operates in.
Select a potential opportunity which could be exploited by the organisation, and justify its selection.
Generate two new product concepts, provide a clear explanation of the concept and illustrate how they are connected to the opportunity.
Evaluate the two new product concepts and recommend one new product concept for the organisation to take forward into the next stage of full screen testing. Your evaluation needs to consider factors such as fit with the strategy, technical and marketing feasibility. Please note you are not expected to undertake market research for this project. However, the evaluation needs to be substantiated using credible sources such as journal articles and reports.
Provide recommendations.
This assignment focuses on the early stages of the new product process, in particular stages 1–3. You may choose to base this on your own organisation or an organisation you are familiar with, or a fictitious company. Ensure you support your discussion with relevant journal articles and reports.

RE STAGES 1-3 Notes from course material:
The textbook process has five main phases:
1. Opportunity identification and selection
This part of the process is needed in order to identify ideas and concepts that are
strategically significant to the particular organisation. That is the value of strategic
planning–finding opportunistic pathways into the future. Those paths are invariably
based on products.

2. Concept generation
Raw and speculative ideas that may or may not have merit for development must be
processed into product concepts with enough detail so that managers can make useful decisions about whether they have market potential. For example, from brainstorming, hundreds of ideas must be reduced to just a few relevant ones based on company strengths, market prospects and so on.
3. Concept/project evaluation
Just as ideas are screened and reduced, concepts must be evaluated further in order to test their potential for the investment of valuable development cash. At this stage the
textbook discusses the ‘fuzzy front end’ of New Product Development i.e. the phases
of strategic planning, concept generation, and concept evaluation when the new
concepts are still somewhat vague.
4. Development
It is here that the product begins to take shape and form. It is where the product is
designed in both technical design and marketing program design. For a service, the process of the service is being designed. Of course the new product must be tested and
modified until it is eventually right for the market.
5. Launch
This phase looks at planning the tasks needed to prepare for launch, the actual launch activity, and the post-launch tasks needed to track and secure the product’s place in the market. For example, imagine the tasks involved in launching a new mobile phone worldwide–the advertising tasks, the product distribution needed to have stocks in
each country, and the tracking and post-launch analysis tasks needed to check why it isn’t selling as planned or why it is selling better than planned.
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COMPANY OF CHOICE: SOOTHE – massage on the demand: (www.soothe.com).
Products I would like the assignment based on.
1) Silicone suction cupping.
2) Gua Sha (scraping, aka – coining or spooning).

– Please note… I personally think Gua Sha is a better product – Marks on the skin fade in 3 days compared to 2 weeks, and you need less tools, and can access more of the body (no suction is needed) so perfect for limbs and neck work – not just the back… However cupping is more widely known by the public especially after Jennifer Anniston and Gwenuth paltrow did red carpet walks with cupping bruises….)
Note also – Soothe will be launching in Asian, middle eastern and european markets soon, so this market research applies globally.
Factors to consider:
– curriculum of massage schools and likelihood for therapists to already know the techniques – Gua sha and cupping are taught in Australian massage diplomas but only briefly, not sure about other countries.
– marketability in various countries given cultural practices (ie, Asian countries are all comfortable with the techniques, western countries still have fear associated with misunderstanding around “bruises / stagnation marks”.