New Product Planning

'Unrealistic timings', 'Little marketing expertise', 'Tensions between the medical / marketing and sales interface', 'Lack of information' are just a few of the problems faced when developing a product.

In a demanding marketplace where the pressure for return on investment is great and there are significant advances in the way your competitors are planning, you can't afford to allow these issues to affect your preparations. For each new product, developing a brand strategy that covers all the bases is vital.

Used effectively, customer insight provide a commercial orientation for product development from the very early stages - beginning at Phase Two trials with a target product profile that will give you competitive advantage.

A structured ‘thought process' will help you make those initial strategic decisions and allow you to strengthen/refine your strategy as your understanding of what you will and won't have is improved. Throughout the decision-making process you need to make sure that you stay very customer-focused as only in this way will you be able to eventually meet the needs of a demanding and changing market.



There are 8 core phases to consider:

1. acquiring customer insight: this serves as the basis of formulating the positioning idea and also helps you develop an optimal approach to segmentation and feeds your analysis;
2. undertaking the situational analysis: necessary to help you understand the different opportunities, the barriers that need to be overcome to maximise each opportunity and what you have that will work in your favour or work against you as you try to capitalise on the opportunity.
3. deciding where you’re going to set your sights:…how ambitious you’re really going to be given the situation.
4. working up a strategy: this is all about exploring the options you have and making some choices as to which opportunity(s) you will focus on.
5. defining what will be Critical to Success: an extremely important stage because these provide the link between strategy and implementation and if expressed well, go a long way towards keeping you ‘on strategy.’
6. the setting of operational objectives which are developed against the CSFs to provide a lot more clarity around what really needs to be achieved in the next year…
7. developing the key actions (tactics) which explain precisely what we need to do to achieve these objectives.
8. finally keeping the focus: then the means by which we make sure we stay focused (ie measures that we can monitor and control).


St.Clair have insight into all aspects of the strategic planning process and can use our knowledge and experience to help you with yours. Why not contact the Principal consultant, Janice on +44 (0) 20 7431 3693  and see how our insight can help make a real difference.