1. Elec3017:
Electrical Engineering Design
Chapter 3: Marketing Tools
A/Prof D. S. Taubman
September 18, 2006
1 Purpose of this Chapter
This chapter is principally concerned with marketing tools. Customer-focused
marketing tools are the subject of Section 2, while Section 3 considers some of
the tools available to assess the state of the market at large, including market
trends and the state of your competitors. These tools are central to the needs
assessment and requirements analysis phases of design, and so we also discuss
these phases specifically in Section 4.
Marketing tools also have application to other phases in the design process.
Marketing plays a key role in establishing a price for your product, which also
affects the features and performance which can be achieved for that price; this
topic is the subject of Section 5. When you think of the term “marketing,” you
probably think of advertising. More generally, this aspect of marketing has to
do with how your product will be positioned in the marketplace, with respect to
its competitors. Positioning is central to a solid business plan and is discussed
in Section 6.
2 Finding out what Customers Want
This section is concerned with tools that can be used to find out what real cus-
tomers actually want. This is also called primary marketing. These tools may
be used in the needs assessment phase to find out what needs exist that are
not being fulfilled by existing products. They may be used in the requirements
analysis phase to find out what features customers would expect of a product
you plan to design. They may be used once a prototype has been constructed,
to assess the usability of the prototype, discover previously unrecognized re-
quirements, and so forth.
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2.1 Surveys
Surveys are the most obvious and also the least informative means to learn what
customers want. The most fundamental drawback of surveys is that they are not
interactive. A customer is limited to providing information in response to the
questions on the survey. This leaves no room for customers to provide feedback
of a nature which was not anticipated when the survey was constructed.
Survey participants are usually unpayed, which means that they are unlikely
to devote much effort or thought to the questions which are put to them. Many
people refuse to participate in surveys precisely because they seek to extract
valuable knowledge and time from consumers without appropriate compensa-
tion. As a result, surveys do not provide a balanced sampling of the target
market.
Nevertheless, surveys can be useful for answering certain questions, particu-
larly where information is required from a large number of respondents. Surveys
can be used to deduce the price that people would expect or be prepared to pay
for a product (see Section 5), but they are less useful for determining user needs
or estimating sales volume. For example, you could find that 50% of all survey
respondents say that they would purchase a product, as described, but when
you actually put the product on the market only 1% of potential customers
actually buy it. Beware of this trap if you are planning to use surveys for your
ELEC3017 design project.
2.2 Focus Groups
Focus groups typically involve 8 to 12 potential customers who are payed to
participate in a focussed discussion session lasting 1 or 2 hours. A moderator
facilitates the discussion, describing the type of product being explored and
explaining the type of questions to which answers are sought. The principle
idea behind focus groups is that participants can feed off each other’s remarks
to come up with ideas that would not have emerged if each participant were
interviewed separately. For this reason, the moderator must be careful not to
impose too rigid a structure on the discussion. Focus groups are normally video
taped and later analyzed to ensure that all information is captured.
Focus groups are not cheap, either in time or money. To capture most
potential customer needs may require 5, 10 or even more separate focus groups,
each lasting a couple of hours. One way to improve the effectiveness of a focus
group is to seek to populate the group with lead users. The term lead user is
used to refer to refer to people whose jobs, hobbies or interests cause them to
experience needs early, before the majority of the market. Lead users are also
known as early adopters. Lead users may be familiar with the inadequacies
of existing products well before the rest of the market; indeed, they may even
already have a solution in mind. Also, since lead users are likely to benefit most
from new products, they often tend to be willing to help.
Another important factor in the success of focus groups is the degree to which
participants are able to comprehend the type of product which is envisioned.

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One way to facilitate this is to create a mock-up (non-functional prototype)
of the product to act as a talking point. Sketches can also be useful. Note,
however, that it is important to inform participants that they should not feel
limited by the particular forms they are shown.
Finally, it is important for the facilitator to pose good questions to the focus
group. Here is a list of some questions that you might consider using.
1. “What would you expect (or be prepared) to pay for a product like this?”
2. “Would this product save you time?”
3. “Would this product save you money?”
4. “What aspects of existing, similar products do you find most annoying?”
5. “What lifetime would you expect the product to have?”
6. “How important is reliability for this product?”
7. “How accurate does the product need to be?”
2.3 Interviews
Interviews run in a very similar way to focus groups. The key difference is that
participants are interviewed individually, rather than participating in a larger
group discussion. One advantage of this is that you might get more informa-
tion from individuals who would otherwise feel inhibited in a group setting.
As a result, you might get more information per customer, which is valuable
considering that they are being payed. On the other hand, more resources per
participant are required to conduct interviews, and interview participants do
not have the opportunity to hear and reflect on other customers’ thoughts.
2.4 Observing Products in Use
Rather than just discussing products, a lot can be learned by observing cus-
tomers interacting with existing similar products. By video taping and later
analyzing the ways in which a large body of customers interact with products,
you may learn some important weaknesses that your own product can address.
Of course, such interaction can be coupled with an interview or done in focus
groups. Unfortunately, this method of market research applies only to estab-
lished product types, where examples already exist.
3 Secondary Market Intelligence
In this section, we are concerned with secondary market information. This
is indirect information about the market at large, gained from from company
profiles, pre-compiled statistics and the like. As an example, suppose you are

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considering the design of a professional product for body hair removal. To deter-
mine the size of your potential market (i.e., the number of potential customers)
you would naturally be interested in statistics such as the number of salons in
your target geographical region, the number of customers they have, the number
of companies that sell similar products and so forth. As another example, sup-
pose you are developing an aid for the blind. One of the first things you would
be interested in is how many blind people there are in your target geographical
region (e.g., in Australia).
Broadly speaking, market intelligence can be classified into four categories,
as follows.
1. Understanding who your potential customers are:
How many of them are there? Where are they? etc.
2. Understanding your competitors:
What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their business strate-
gies? What is their market share?
3. Understanding the state of your industry:
Is it growing or shrinking? Are new technologies being introduced or being
developed?
4. Understanding the socio-political and economic environment:
Are there any relevant social changes taking place (e.g., increasing aware-
ness of environment impact)? Are there any relevant legislation changes
(e.g., new safety legislation)? Are there any factors or trends affecting
people’s spending habits or spending power (e.g., changes in exchange
rates)?
Sources of secondary market information include:
• government census data;
• the internet;
• newspaper articles;
• trade journals;
• company annual reports;
• stock market/analyst reports; and
• reports compiled by marketing firms — you may have to purchase these.

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4 Needs Assessment and Requirements Analy-
sis
As mentioned in Chapter 2, we prefer to use the term needs assessment to refer
to the process of identifying needs which are not met by existing products. As
such, needs assessment does not need to be coupled to the design of a specific
product and may precede the decision to undertake a specific design effort. Es-
sentially, the question you are trying to answer is: “Is there a need for a new
product in this area?” One way to answer this question is to observe potential
customers using existing related products, or ask potential customers what frus-
trates them about existing products. This may be done through focus groups
or interviews, as discussed in Section 2. Where a need is identified, the extent
of that need (e.g., number of people likely to share the same need) might be
estimated with the aid of secondary marketing information. The need for new
products might also arise in connection with socio-political changes identified
through market intelligence. For example, changes in road safety legislation
might give rise to the need for new types of bicycle lighting/warning systems.
The term needs assessment is often used interchangably with requirements
analysis. For the purpose of these notes, however, we prefer to use the term
requirements analysis to refer to the process of discovering the set of require-
ments and features for a specific product which we have already decided to
design (at least tentatively). By and large, the raw input to the requirements
analysis phase comes from primary marketing tools such as those discussed in
Section 2, but a survey of your competitors products and business strategies
(i.e., secondary market intelligence) may also help to identify what features are
considered important.
4.1 Organizing and Prioritizing Requirements
The information collected from primary marketing sources should consist of
recorded statements from potential customers. It is important that you resist
the temptation to rephrase or reinterpret these statements in the first instance,
since this runs the risk of superimposing your own expectations on the raw
responses you collect.
The next step is to organize, interpret and priortize the raw response data,
in order to derive customer requirements. The techniques here are basically
applied common sense, but the following suggestions should nevertheless prove
useful.
• Start by organizing customer responses into categories. There are many
ways you can do this, and the most appropriate way will ultimately depend
on the product. As an example, you might create categories corresponding
to price, reliability, usability, performance, interoperability and so forth.
• Within each category, try to capture the essence of the views expressed by
your potential customers with a single requirements statement. One useful

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guideline when doing this is to try to express requirements using positive
language only. For example, some customers might have told you that
the product should not be bulky, but this can be positively rephrased as
a requirement that the product be small or light weight. Looking at other
responses in the same category may help to identify whether the objective
is to reduce size or weight or both. As another example, customers might
have told you that the product should not make annoying noises. This can
be rephrased as a requirement for quiet operation. The reason for doing
this is that design objectives should be positive attributes of the product.
• When interpreting customer input within each category, be careful to ex-
press what the product should do, rather than how it should do it. For
example, a customer might have said that they would like to hear a loud
beep when the machine has finished doing its work. It would be bet-
ter, however, to express this as a requirement that the machine provides
a means for alerting users that it has completed its work. The actual
alerting mechanism is too specific at this stage.
• If you have a lot of categories of response data, try to organize them into
a hierarchy. You might build such a hierarchy by starting with broad
classes such as functional requirements and non-functional requirements.
Here, non-functional requirements might include aspects such as appear-
ance, price, size and weight. Other broad categories of requirements which
you might find useful include user interface requirements, performance
requirements, requirements for the product’s inputs and requirements for
the product’s outputs. In the end, finding creative ways to organize the re-
quirements will help you later on with the problem statement and concept
generation phases.
• Based on your primary market research, try to identify the relative impor-
tance of the various requirements. As discussed in Chapter 1, some stated
requirements are really just desirable features, while others are critical
to consumer acceptance of the product. You may later find that some
requirements cannot be satisfied together without excessive cost; in this
case, you will need to know which ones are the safest to drop.
Although the above tips are nothing but common sense, it is important
to think of such things as early as possible. If you do not consider the need
to prioritize requirements at the time when you are conducting interviews or
focus groups, you may not ask sufficient questions to help you to do so later
on. Similarly, if you do not make an effort to clarify customer responses during
interviews or focus groups, you may not be able to reliably reinterpret a negative
statement in terms of a positive requirement for the product later on. You don’t
need to remember a thousand things at once here. You just need to bear in
mind that: a) not all requirements are equally important; and b) the purpose
of gathering customer input is to come up with actual design objectives for the
product.

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5 Price and Sales Volume Information
Two important functions of marketing are: 1) to determine a suitable price
for the product; and 2) to estimate the number of products that you will be
able to sell. These are, of course, connected. In many cases, lowering the price
will result in an increased number of sales and vice-versa, although this is not
always the case. If the price is too low, customers may view your products as
low quality or sub-standard in some other respect, causing the sales volume to
drop. Understanding the interaction between price and sales volume helps you
to make important design decisions later on. If a feature has a large impact on
manufacturing cost, it may reduce profit margins to unacceptable levels or else
push the price up to a point where sales volume drops. This must be balanced
against the impact of the feature on product desirability and competitiveness
in the marketplace.
5.1 Sales Volume Estimation
If your company is already selling products similar to the one you intend to
design, it may be possible to estimate sales volume for the new product based
on sales history of your existing products. More generally, you could collect
statistics on the total number of products of this type which are sold annually
in your target market segment (Australia, or perhaps the world), multiplying
this figure by your estimated market share.
For new products, the situation is much more difficult. One way in which you
could estimate the sales volume for a new product is to start by identifying each
of the individual market segments (i.e., types of consumers) for your product,
estimating the number of consumers in each market segment, the frequency or
number of units which they would need to purchase, and the likelihood that
they will buy your product rather than that of a competitor. This approach is
generally known as the build-up method.
The build-up method is best illustrated with an example. Suppose you are
contemplating the design of a new ionizing food sterilization product. There
are no products of this form currently in the market, or so your research tells
you. You begin by identifying key segments of the market that would be most
interested in such a product. You consider hospital kitchens, large hotel chains,
cafés, sandwich shops, airline food caterers and other major food preparation
businesses. Later, you consider the broader market of hiegene-consious con-
sumers preparing packed lunches in the home. In each case, you use secondary
marketing information to estimate the number of entities in each identified mar-
ket segment (e.g., number of hospitals, number of hotels, and so forth). You
separately estimate the number of products each entity in each type of market
segment would be likely to purchase in a year, multiplying this by the percent-
age of these purchases you can expect to be from your company’s products (i.e.,
your market share). Even for a new product, it is usually reckless to assume a
100% market share. One reason for this is that good ideas are often conceived
simultaneously by multiple organizations around the world. As second reason is

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that a successful new product may soon be reproduced by other manufacturers,
unless you have effective intellectual property protection (see Chapter 16).
Fundamentally, the build-up method is a bottom-up approach, accumulat-
ing sales estimates from the invidual market segments at the periphery of the
distribution hierarchy. The build-up method is most appropriate for specialized
products, where the number of distinct market segments is manageable and
each market segment may have different purchasing behaviour. The informa-
tion required to assess purchasing frequency within any given market segment
may be obtained by primary marketing tools — e.g., interviewing representatives
from that market segment. For the example described above, this may mean
interviewing hospital kitchen managers, hotel chefs, sandwich shop managers
and so forth.
Another approach to sales volume estimation is the break down approach,
also sometimes known as the work back method. This is a top-down approach
which starts with the entire population in your target market (e.g., the entire
population of Australia) as a potential consumer base. This initial consumer
base is progressively narrowed by chaining a sequence of more specific estimates.
Again, this is best estimated through an example. Suppose we are trying to
estimate sales for a new electronic entertainment product. For the sake of this
example, we consider our geographical target market to be Australia and start
with the population of Australia as our initial consumer base — say 20 million
people. We next estimate the fraction of the population which falls within our
target demographic group — 20 to 50 year old consumers in middle to high
income brackets. Let’s say that this group represents 30% of the population.
Next, we estimate the frequency with which these consumers would purchase a
new electronic entertainment product — say once every 3 years, or a frequency of
1/3 per annum. Then we try to assess the likelihood that the product of choice
by these consumers is the one we are planning on designing (our market share).
This last piece of information is estimated from focus groups for the purpose of
this example, and found to be 10%. However, we also allow for the fact that our
competitors may come up with similar products in a similar timeframe to us.
Allowing for this, we reduce our estimate to 2% of the market for new electronic
entertainment products, yielding a sales volume estimate of
¡ ¢ 1
20 × 106 × 0.3 × × 0.02 = 40000 units / annum
3
Obviously, there are many related ways to apply the break down approach.
For example, rather than starting from the entire population of Australia, we
could have started with more specific census data relating to our target de-
mographic. We could also have started with sales statistics for the consumer
electronics industry and progressively narrowed this down to consumers inter-
ested in the type of product we have in mind. Regardless of the specifics, the
key feature of the break down method is its top-down procedure. This approach
is most suitable for generic products where sales are expected to be uniformly
distributed across the target population.
In addition to the build-up, break-down and sales history based methods

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described above, other strategies for sales volume estimation can be identified.
One notable additional method is that of trialing your product within selected
communities. Such trials have been used to assess consumer uptake of smart
cards, advanced mobile telephony services and other novel products. Unfortu-
nately, test marketing of this form is very expensive and requires the availability
of highly functional versions of the product under consideration.
Since no method for sales volume estimation is particularly reliable, the best
approach is to try multiple methods and compare their predictions.
5.2 Setting a Selling Price
In the previous sub-section, we considered the problem of sales volume estima-
tion without reference to product features, product performance and product
price, which will inevitably impact sales. We can understand the effect of these
factors in terms of market share. A high priced product might have many fea-
tures, but still yield a lower market share due to the availability of cheaper
products on the market. An important function of marketing is to establish a
target selling price for the product, preferably in the very early stages of design.
We will being by considering two simplified methods, known as the cost plus
and target price methods.
The cost plus method starts with the cost of manufacturing the product, say
C $/unit, and then adds a margin M to yield a selling price of
P = C (1 + M ) $/unit.
In most cases, retail chains are involved, which add their own markups R, so
that the selling price to the customer becomes
P = C (1 + M ) (1 + R) $/unit.
Typical retail markups for consumer products may be 100% (i.e., R = 1) or
more. The manufacturing margin M may also be on the order of 100% (i.e.,
M = 1). The manufacturing margin is developed through experience to cover
product development costs (including the development of products which do not
make it to market for one reason or another), organization overheads and, of
course, company profit.
One major drawback of the cost plus method is that it may set the price too
high for the product to sell. This is connected with the fact that the product
must be substantially designed before manufacturing costs can be calculated,
so that product features are set without reference to the price consumers are
willing to pay. This tends to result in the design of great products, which may
be too expensive for consumers to afford. While selling price can be reduced at
the expense of the margin M , there is a limit to how small M can be before
the product becomes unprofitable to produce — remember that M contributes
to product development expenses as well as profit.
At the other end of the scale lies the target price method. The target price
method sets the selling price based on what consumers are prepared to pay,

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Target price method: based on
Volume the price consumers are willing
(units/year) to pay (i.e., before price starts
hurting volume)
Price ($/unit)
Profit
($/year) Cost-plus method: based
on the price you need to
charge to make a good
Optimal price: may be margin
somewhere between
cost-plus and target
price methods Price ($/unit)
Figure 1: Relationship between volume, price and profit.
without regard for manufacturing cost. In this case, the selling price is deduced
from primary and/or secondary marketing tools alone. Surveys, interviews and
focus groups may be used to discover what people would expect or be prepared
to pay for a product like the one envisioned. Secondary information such as
the selling price of competing products may also play an important role. The
obvious drawback of the target price method is that it might not be possible to
design a product which can be sold at the target price while making a profit.
Nevertheless, the target price method is gaining popularity over cost plus for
most consumer products.
As mentioned, the cost plus and target price methods are best understood as
simplified approaches to the problem of setting a selling price. A more rigorous
approach involves the determination of a volume-price curve, such as that shown
in Figure 1. This figure also helps us to see that the target price and cost plus
methods as providing two extreme points in a continuum of options, neither of
which is generally optimal. The volume-price curve is generally derived using
the primary marketing tools of surveys, interviews and focus groups. Potential
customers are asked to indicate the price they would pay for an envisaged prod-
uct. Based on input from a large number of potential customers, the dependence
of sales volume on price is deduced. For example, if only 10% of surveyed con-
sumers indicate that they would pay more than $1000 for a product, the sales
volume at that price is estimated by multiplying the sales predictions derived
in accordance with Section 5.1 by 0.1. If 50% of customers indicate that they
would pay $500 for the product, the sales volume at that price is estimated to
be 5 times higher.
As suggested by Figure 1, the target price method may be interpreted as set-
ting the selling price as high as possible without severely impacting the expected
sales volume. From price and volume, a second curve can be derived which re-
flects expected total profit as a function of price. This curve is also depicted in

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Figure 1. The expected total profit is essentially just the product of the sales
volume and the difference between the selling price and the manufacturing cost.
That is,
Profit = V (P ) × (P − C)
Where the selling price includes a retail markup R, this equation must obviously
be modified to µ ¶
P
Profit = V (P ) × −C .
1+R
When the price is low, volume will be high but per-unit profit low. When the
price is high, per-unit profit will be high but volume low. Somewhere between
these extremes lies the price which maximizes the total profit. Noting that the
cost plus method is concerned principally with making a good per-unit profit,
while the target price method is focused primarily on maintaining high volume,
we should not be surprised to find that the optimum selling price lies somewhere
between these two extremes.
Of couse, the above analysis is overly simplistic. One difficulty is that vol-
ume should depend not only on price, but also on the features which are offered.
Secondly, the manufacturing cost, required to determine profit, cannot be ad-
equately estimated until the design is substantially complete. This highlights
the need to revisit price and volume estimates at various stages in the design
process, as more information becomes available. This, in turn, means that the
marketing tools used to assess consumer price sensitivity will have to be applied
at multiple phases in the design process.
6 Market Positioning
So far, we have considered marketing tools to inform the process of design,
gathering information on consumer needs, product requirements, the price con-
sumers would be willing to pay and the sales volume we could expect. In this
section, we consider a set of broader issues which relate to how we intend to
position our product in the marketplace. We must recognize that the market-
place is continually changing; our competitors are also developing new products,
so our sales predictions might be based on false assumptions. This leads us to
consider two important questions:
1. “What will differentiate our product from those of other manufacturers?”
or, equivalently, “What are our product’s unique selling points?”
2. “What is our company’s competitive advantage?” or, equivalently, “If de-
signing this product is such a great idea, why isn’t everyone else doing the
same thing?”
6.1 Unique selling points
Unique selling points (USPs) are the things which will differentiate your product
from those of its competitors. USPs will be the focus of promotional material,

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Total Product
Tangible Product Service
Non-essential
Credit Brand
features
Name
Technical Product
core benefits
Package
Industrial design
Delivery
Warranty
Installation
Figure 2: Components of the total product in which unique selling points (USPs)
might be found.
such as newpaper and television advertisements. USPs should be readily un-
derstood by consumers, or else extra effort will be required by the product
promotions team to educate consumers about the product’s benefits. Given the
relationship between USPs and product promotion, it is helpful to think ahead
of time of how your product might be advertised to consumers.
The most obvious USPs to engineers are technical features or performance
attributes of the product. Examples include high precision, high resolution, low
power, high efficiency, light weight, multi-standard support, multiple operating
modes, long range, user interface features, and much more. From the consumer’s
perspective, however, there may be many equally important non-technical fea-
tures such as packaging, credit financing, service options and so forth. Figure
2 illustrates how technical and non-technical attributes relate to the complete
product. USPs can potentially be found in each of these areas.
Nevertheless, for the purpose of your ELEC3017 design project, the USPs
that you should focus on are those which are technical in nature. Within this
course, it is pure fantasy to differentiate your design project from that of others
based on non-technical features such as band recognition, line of credit, warran-
tees and the like.
6.2 Competitive Advantage
When embarking on a new business venture of any type, including the design
of a new consumer product, you should ask yourself what differentiates you (or
your business) from others who could do the same thing. People naturally see
business opportunities in products or services which they would like themselves,
but cannot obtain. People also see business opportunities in areas where other

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st
co ren
m gt strong
pe h
tit of
io
n
weak
high Window of
opportunity
product
attractiveness
low
low ability to exploit high
Figure 3: Window of opportunity for new product success.
businesses appear to be operating very successfully with large profit margins.
The nature of competition is that obvious needs tend to get filled and profit mar-
gins get forced down by newcomers to the market, unless there are substantial
barriers to entry.
Barriers to entering a market may include the need for a high degree of tech-
nical competence, the need for complex partnerships, the need for sophisticated
product distribution channels, the need for highly sophisticated manufacturing
facilities, financial barriers and intellectual property protection (patents). Com-
petitive advantage arises from your particular ability to overcome such barriers
to entry. Certainly, having a great technical idea is a competitive advantage,
but there may be other barriers which prevent you from exploiting it. A classic
example is the Xerox corporation, whose PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre)
engineers invented ethernet, the mouse, windows-based graphical user interfaces
for personal computers, and many other massively popular technologies today.
Xerox was not able to exploit any of these technologies because their core busi-
ness was photocopying machines. The company’s core business determines its
distribution channels, manufacturing capabilities, management skills and other
factors critical to product success.
6.3 Window of Opportunity
A useful way to visualize the combined effect of unique selling points and com-
petitive advantage is in terms of the so-called window of opportunity.As shown in
Figure 3, a window of opportunity opens up when at least three factors coincide:
1. You have a product concept which is inherently attractive to consumers,
based on its unique selling points, ability to address real needs, and ac-
ceptable selling price.

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2. Your organization has the technical competence, critical mass of relevant
personnel, manufacturing and product distribution channels required to
realize and deliver the product to the marketplace.
3. Competition in the proposed product area is relatively weak.
The larger the window of opportunity, the more likely you are to be success-
ful both with the specific product in question, and later with the introduction of
a family of related products. The window of opportunity changes dynamically
with technological advances, consumer needs and the entry of new competitors
into the marketplace. Most high technology products only maintain their win-
dow of opportunity for a small number of years before low cost competitors
enter the picture, forcing technology-oriented organizations to be constantly on
the lookout for future technological breakthroughs.
6.4 Screening Criteria for New Products
One useful way to summarize the preceding sub-sections is to consider the fol-
lowing questions. These should form part of the “go/no go” decision process
in determining whether to proceed with the design and development of a new
product.
1. Is there adequate demand for this type of product by consumers?
2. Is the proposed product compatible with environmental and social stan-
dards?
3. Is the proposed product legal and ethical?
4. How will this product be differentiated from others on the market?
5. Does the product fit into the company’s current marketing structures?
6. Is the product compatible with existing production facilities?
7. Does the product fit in with the company’s image and long term objec-
tives?
8. Is sufficient financing available to design, promote and distribute the prod-
uct?
9. Are the necessary technical and managerial skills available to carry out
the proposed product design?
10. Is the proposed product development likely to be profitable?