//Evaluate why it is important for businesses like Sony to develop new products regularly.
New product development is the process of bringing a new product to the market, for example, Sony annually releases a new smartphone with upgraded hardware and new or improved features from its previous device. It is necessary for them to launch a new product frequently for many reasons, such as : change of needs and tastes of customers, the competitiveness of the market, … if the action of developing a new product is not taken, Sony will be put in a very bad position, when they lose profits to another competitors. In order to develop a new product, many information has to be collected, through customers, competitors, market environment…, all is need to give out the best change to the new product, which will be able to satisfy customers’ s needs and tastes and compete successfully with another competitors.
It is truly important for Sony to develop a new product. Firstly, consumers needs and wants change, especially to hi-tech products, people never satisfy with one thing for a long time if they know there are some other better things, for example: a competitor of Sony, Apple, comes out with a new phone that has better camera and cheaper price than Sony’s, in this case, people will recognize the benefits of having that better device and start buying it. This is why Sony has to bring out a new product with improved features, in order to satisfy consumers ‘s wants for a better product, and to compete with another businesses. If a business does not respond to the change soon, there is a high change that they will lose customers to another business, and therefore lose their profits by selling less due to the fact that their product does not satisfy buyers.
Secondly, products reaches the end of its product cycle life, when it has been in the market for a while and the sales are declining due to the fact that most of the people who want it already got it, in the case of Sony’s Play Station gaming device, PS3 was replaced by PS4, this is because PS3 had reached the end of its product cycle life, when the hardware and features are out-of-dated, Sony needs to come out with a better device, with improvement in performance, graphics and features to catch up with the innovation of gaming technology. Therefore, they can attract more customers to buy their product, and continue gaining profits by increasing the sales.
Thirdly, competitors, this is one of the most important factor why a business need to carry out the new product development. In a competitive market like technology market, where new technology and innovation is introduced everyday, competitors will try to apply the new technology to their products to make it better than the others in the market, and also more unique as it will attract more people. We can easily see that Samsung had a success with the big screen smartphone, and then companies like HTC, Apple,… and Sony also made their phone’s screen bigger, in order to not lose over their competitors, also to catch up with the trend. To get the information of the competitors ‘s changes in the product development is essential as it will help the business to know what to do to make their product even more out-standing, and also to consider if they should target the same market or not, in that way they can attract more people to their products.
Lastly, all products experiencing problems, not all businesses can carry out a perfect test of a product’s quality. The fact that a product gets poor reputation because of its problems will decrease the sales and hence the profits. For example : a line of Sony’s smartphone, XPERIA, used to face a significant problem with its screen’s color, got a bad reputation as screen is one of the most striking feature of a phone, Sony started to lose profits as the sales was low, and then they had to offer their customers with free phone repair in order to improve the reputation through customers service.
