Transcript for EO403 - Defining The Market.PDF

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Defining The Market In this video, we're going to look at defining the market. It is crucial to define the market that you will design a product for. First of all, we need to understand the customer needs. Unde...

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Defining The Market In this video, we're going to look at defining the market. It is crucial to define the market that you will design a product for. First of all, we need to understand the customer needs. Understanding customer needs is crucial for the development of a product. We need to understand the customer's point of view-what they want in the product, what they require in terms of the product to do, how it's to function, how it's to look, and so on. And what does the customer care about? Do they care about the cost of the product, the health, the environment, the social aspects that surround the use of the product, politics, et cetera, the use of the product in terms of the social aspects and the politics, and so on? We have to define what the voice of the customer is, and that helps us develop a series of requirements for the product, which in turn will become design requirements and will start the path of the product development. Customer validation is important. Always seek customer validation. There are some pitfalls that we can fall into-believing that you are the customer rather than speaking to the actual customer or the customer group themselves, believing that your friends and family might be the customer when, in fact, they aren't, believing that your customers will never change, that they won't want different things, and believing that all customers are the same when, in fact, different target groups will be completely different. So very important to seek customer validation and to speak to the customer in terms of defining and understanding what the user requires. There are three things that we are going to look at in terms of defining the market. The first one is the target market, and then the competitor analysis, and the third one is a technology review. So the target market, the first one we're going to look at-in order to design a product that appeals to the majority of potential customers, we have to break down the overall market into a number of groups which have common characteristics. And the group that is most likely to purchase your product is called the target market for your product. The target market can depend on a number of things. And usually, we look into these with detail and precision. Demographics, for example-looking at the measurable aspects that are involved with a particular group of people. It could be age. It could be income. It could be a number of things. Geography plays a part in the target market depending on where the consumer lives or where the consumer is going to use the product. Page 1/2 Lifestyles impact the target market. We can have those with completely different lifestyles using products in different ways. Benefits and loyalty are also important. There will be particular target markets that show brand loyalty for a particular product, and that will help impact when carrying out any new product development. The second aspect of defining the market that we're going to look at is competitor analysis. Competitor analysis identifies and evaluates existing competitor products, highlighting the strengths and the weaknesses. And typically when carrying out a particular new piece of product development, we would look at other competitors in the market. We would look to those products and look for the positive aspects, the negative aspects, where we can improve that particular product. We would look at things like the cost and the scale, the size, and the functionality of that particular product. And again, we would talk to customers in relation to this to try and get feedback on those competitors that are already out there in the market. And finally, we'd look at a technology review. A technology review investigates and evaluates a whole range of technologies that already exist in particular products and also those that might be suitable for the development of any new products that would serve particular functions. We can look at the possibility of how to power the product. We can look at what exists in terms of the technology used in terms of sensors, electronics, and mechatronics. We can look at other examples of the product that we might be wanting to improve and look at the existing technology in order to improve on that. We can also look at other technologies that haven't been applied to this particular area that we're developing within and see if those technologies, perhaps very new technologies, might be applied in some way. So that is a brief overview of defining the market. It's important in terms of new product development because this is the context within which you will be designing. Page 2/2