Building Scalable Products

In Friday's Marketing Management class, Professor Marc Meyer of Northeastern University outlined the role marketing generally plays in the organization. He also went on to detail the importance of building robust products and then deciding which markets to target by leveraging existing technology for new applications.

Prof. Meyer's experience in conceiving, building and then successfully delivering products to market is amazing. Ironically enough he's also a software engineer by trade, and true to form, during his presentation dropped many software related terms in reference to building tangible, scalable products with multiple market applications (ie, 'instantiation', 'modularity', 'reuse', etc). In fact a fair amount of his lecture dealt with strategies used in the modularizing and targeting of markets and the subsequent positioning of products into them.

It's Prof. Meyer's opinion that when determining how to segment potential markets, it's best to consider use contexts. Customers buy benefits so the challenge is to determine how they use products to benefit their lives. This is no easy task, in fact, anymore successful companies are realizing they must approach the marketing side of the business with as much intellectual vigor as the technical side. If done right though, Prof. Meyer believes marketing innovation can make more money than technology innovation.