Discuss about the New Product Development for Silver Shark Inc. Company.
Overview of Silver Shark Company
Silver Shark is known to be the designer, manufacturer and marketer of mobile communication devices, portable digital multimedia contents (audio and video), and personal computers. Silver Shark also sells other several related peripherals, software’s, networking solutions, services, and third party digital content and some various applications that it makes. Silver Shark offers include, iPhone handsets, iPad portable multimedia, iPods line that is known to have portable video players and digital players. The company has its main headquarters in South Africa, in Cape Town.
Silver Shark has recently identified some opportunities in other parts of Africa. Word about its high quality products has spread all over and now its products are in very high demand in many parts. There is a good opportunity because recent research indicates there so much technological advancements and economic growth around Africa meaning that so many people are capable of purchasing the company products. The company’s target market encompasses consumers, educators, creative professionals and students around the African continent. The company has successfully managed to come up with a huge world following that has prompted a sustained demand of its products (Crawford & Benedetto, 2014).
In its vision, the company believes that it is in the world to make great excellent products and that it’s not going to change it. The company also emphasizes that it’s only constantly focused on innovation of new quality products. The company believes in deep cross-pollination and collaboration of its different groups. This allows Silver Shark to innovate in ways that the other companies cannot.
“Silver Shark company is always committed to giving its customers the best personal computing exposure and experience especially to the creative professionals, educators and the students by innovating great excellent products like the software’s, internet offers, and hardware’s.”
A product concept can be defined as the main core objective or purpose of a particular service or product, its promise and uniqueness in meeting the unmet expectations of the clients. Silver Sharks concept statement gives a factual summary of its products benefits and goes ahead to even differentiate from its other competitors. However, one challenge that has for long been associated with the product concept of different companies is that these product concepts sometimes result to myopia when it comes to marketing. Silver Sharks product concept is mainly based on two concepts and they include (Kahn, 2012).
Customer satisfaction is considered to be the most important concept to all the companies. It gives business owners together with the marketers a good metric where they are able to improve and manage their business operations effectively. There are several reasons as to why customer satisfaction is seen to be vital to many companies around the world and they encompass; customer satisfaction reduces negative perceptions about the company; leads to consumer lifetime value; it is known to be the main point of differentiation; it enables the company to even acquire new purchasers; it is seen as an indicator of the customer repurchase of the new products from the customer. Silver Shark focuses on the satisfaction of its clients by producing high quality products that are user friendly and of high quality.
Product quality can be viewed as a way of understanding how the products provided by the manufacturers have more selling capabilities and also to make sure that the same products are not also offered by other competitors. However, caution must be taken because a company may end up producing high quality products that are not really needed by the consumers in the market. By maintaining the high quality of its products, Silver Shark has successfully managed to establish itself in the technological market world. It is praised for its excellent products around the world by many of its clientele base (Karol & Nelson, 2007).
Customer Satisfaction
From my own point of view, I strongly believe that the most important concept between these two is the concept on satisfaction of customers. It is very clear that customers play a major significant role when it comes to the processes in different companies. The customers are always the first priority to be considered before any organizational structures and strategies are even put in place. Some of the questions that are often asked in any strategic planning may range from, “who is going to consume the product?” “Where are these people that are going to consume the product?” and finally will they be fully satisfied. Segmentation of the markets, designing of the product and finally creation of awareness about the product is only done after these questions have gotten some answers. This clearly shows and tells us how significant the concept of customer satisfaction is to the companies.
There is really no doubt that Silver Shark’s product strategy is by innovating high quality products that appeal to its customers. The company calls this strategy as the “excellent product” strategy. The company for many years ever since its inception has continued to hold on to its higher standards of quality products. The company has refused to be like other product manufacturers who only pack products that are always full of chock-full features. Even though these chock-full products may seem to be impressively advanced, most of them are known to be complicated when being operated in simple terms; they are not really user friendly.
When it comes to packaging of its products, Silver Shark cannot be said to be lacking in this. The company is praised for being the only company that gives simple and clean but yet functional packaging of its products that is clearly evident from its satisfied customers who have praised it for that (Olsen, 2015). Silver Sharks “excellent strategy” is known to also center on quality over quantity. This clearly shows us that the company is only focused on selected products and will always continue to improve them rather than deciding to branch out so as to come up with other different products. According to research, it has been discovered that anything that strikes an impression in one’s consciousness is often expected to have a lasting impression on the individual.
Silver Shark has always endeavored to make its brands more synonymous. Due to the major role that todays technology plays in one’s lifestyle, passion, innovation, and the human nature’s innate want to poses a small measure of control or even much more power, the company has capitalized on this to give people what they really want. The company products have given to people a sense of control over their lifestyle through the integration of the concepts of convenience and simplicity. The company has magnificently created a connection with its clients around the world that can only be defined in better terms as “intimate”
Over the years, Silver Shark has firmly established itself among consumers and designers alike with its major product logo of an eagle. This logo has inspired many other imaginative and even more stunning product concepts. Designers, artists, and even its fans have attempted to invent both whimsical and practical Silver Shark devices. These whimsical devices have sometimes been thought to resemble future products; sometimes they are taken to be even very strange. This clearly proves how people really love and trust the Silver Shark products.
Silver Shark feasibility study mainly focuses on helping them to answer some essential questions like whether the company should proceed with a particular proposed project idea or not. All its operation activities are always directed at answering these questions. The company has always been using these feasibility studies to mainly focus on its proposed business ventures. It is very imperative for all companies that have business ideas to first of all conduct a thorough feasibility study so as to know the real viability of their business idea in the market before they can start doing any business development on the idea. Early determination of the success or failure of a particular business can help companies in saving money, time and future heartache’s. A company that is able to withstand the risks it faces, generate enough profits and cash flow, remain stronger in the long term and also meets the main goals of its founders is said to be the best feasible business venture (Reinertsen, 2009).
In the recent past, several products by other companies that compete with Silver Shark have been rejected and criticized by many consumers around the world. It is reported these consumers have been feeling more and more disgruntled with the operating systems of the other companies due to their lack of new features and innovation. Rapid innovation of different products by these companies has turned out to be a bigger problem.
Some of the products that these companies innovate have been marked as experimental in the business market rather than being taken as serious products. This has made these products to even have a shorter shelf life and there is no doubt that sooner than later they will be taken away from the market. For this reason, it is very important for all companies that have a record of following product concepts to put all their energy and efforts in using technology so as to produce excellent quality products to attract an optimum client satisfaction.
Silver Sharks product design team has always been thinking of many ways of manufacturing and designing the company’s new products. However, Silver Shark does not have unlimited assets and resources that can able it to explore other multiple design approaches for its products. Silver Shark Company has always focused on getting its products launched as soon as possible. The company’s product statement alone has been one way of bringing purpose, clarity to its products, cohesion and the developmental process.
Silver Sharks product concept statement has a headline that has been praised for grabbing its customer’s attention, the reasons and benefits of why its customers must believe in its excellent quality products. For instance, some of its product headlines include, “best value in the market today” and “fastest selling product in the market”. Under the headlines, the company has outlined the main benefits of its products to the potential customers. For instance, the company markets its computer systems as having lower power consumption and also has a more superior performance. The company’s final concept statement explains the reasons for its customers to believe in its products such as the quality of its ingredients and its product technical specifications. When it comes to its computers, Silver Shark, talks about specifications like the monitor, hard disk and the processing speed.
According to research, excellent concept statements have always proven to evoke feelings and moods. Such concepts although are explicit when stating the main purpose of the product, they most of the time let the reader to visualize the benefits of the product. An excellent concept statement uses a language that is simple void of any technical jargon. Silver Shark’s concepts have always been realistic and clear.
Silver Sharks tests its products and its accompanying statements before launching them in the market for consumers. The company has always done carried out thorough market research, as it is the only accurate way to guarantee it the potential customers acceptance. This has continually helped the company to track the consumer buying changes and behaviors when it comes to consumer preferences. The only way of influencing such a consumer buying behavior is by having the best concept statement (Trott,2012).
Any new product in the market must always start as an idea. Silver Sharks ideas most of the times are known to originate from the brainstorming sessions by its experts. Other ideas of the company normally come up as a direct response to the needs of its customers from the market or sometimes when the company wants to counter a competitor product. The company’s ideas normally go through a screening process so as to take all the quality ideas. Such a screening process encompasses different general projections like profitability, market reception of the product and the cost (Olsen, 2015).
Silver Shark’s concept testing and development phase aims to gauge its customer’s reaction to its overall idea on its new products. Many big companies are for using focus teams in collection of data on whether the consumers will buy their products and also how regular they are likely to buy and also know their acceptable price levels. Some of the smaller businesses are said to be using focus teams, though these teams are most of the time not actually formal. Though the questions in small companies might be informal, most of the time they yield positive valuable results (Crawford & Benedetto, 2014).
The company’s new ideas have always been known to survive the testing phase and developmental concept. This has made it possible now for the company to come up with a formal analysis of all its new products viability. To be precise, analysis includes a company’s expected profit margin and the production costs together with the total market size of its products. All companies are always advised to weigh the position of their product in the business market.
Conclusion
It is estimated that more than 27% of all new product ideas mostly emanate from either listening or watching the customer’s reaction towards particular products. Silver Shark uses such information to improve the acceptability percentage of its products by its loyal customers around the world. This is what has distinguished it from all the other companies that do not really pay so much attention to the needs of the clients.
References
Cooper, R. G. (2011). Winning at New Products: Creating Value Through Innovation.
Cooper, R. G., & Edgett, S. J. (2009). Lean,Rapid and Profitable New Product Development.
Crawford, C. M., & Benedetto, C. A. (2014). New Products Management.
Kahn, K. B. (2012). The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development.
Karol, R., & Nelson, B. (2007). New Product Development For Dummies.
Olsen, D. (2015). The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Fedddback.
Reinertsen, D. G. (2009). The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development.
Trott, P. Innovation Management & New Product Development (5th ed.).
Bibliography
Alvarez. (2014). Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy.
Ries, Eric. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.
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