Consumer Involvement in New Product Development Essay - 1

Consumer Involvement in New Product Development - Essay Example The paper tells that in the development of new products, customers participate to give new ideas to help create the products through communication. The process referred to as co-creation, employed by the developers, is important in the new product development sector. In this case, customers may come up with new goods or services or simply try to improve on what is already circulating in the market to fulfill their needs. These ideas shared by customers reach the intended producer through different avenues like the company website or through social media. Co-creation used this way is a symbiotic relationship in which the customers and the firms collude and make a product where the customer will enjoy interacting with the product and the producer will meet the customer’s needs. Producers nowadays use this mode of collaboration as a way to reduce time in the production process and ease their thinking and the uncertainty that comes with the new product, questioning whether the pro duct fits the market and carrying out surveys for gauging where most customers lie, either in favor or out of favor. The scope of co-creation is the extent to which an organization decides to involve the consumer in the development stages up to the post-launch stage. Threadless.com is a T-shirt manufacturing company high on the scope and they depend on co-creation for manufacturing their products. The consumers submit T-shirt designs online and the company employees and visitors to the site vote. The designer who wins gets a monetary compensation and retains the rights to the design. The co-creation process does not end there, but after launching the product. In the end, it serves as a marketing strategy.