| Topics in Marketing. |
| Key concepts |
| Product / Price / Service / Retail |
| Promotion |
| Advertising / Sales promotion |
| Promotional media |
| Newspapers / Magazines |
| Roles |
Product management is a function within a company dealing with the day-to-day management and welfare of a product or family of products at all stages of the product lifecycle.
In theory this need not be a marketing-oriented function; indeed, one might perhaps expect it to be more related to a product-oriented approach, for its focus is on the individual product. On the other hand, many managers see `marketing‘ as the function that integrates operations at the level below corporate strategy; with 5% even seeing this as marketing‘s most important role! The classical definition of a brand manager used to be that he or she was `to the brand what the managing director was to the company‘. More cynically, brand managers have been heard to complain that they carry all the responsibility with none of the authority. [[1]]
In practice there are two main benefits to the product management approach:
Cross-functional Coordination. The most direct, and perhaps the most important, result is that each product has all its activities coordinated so that they are optimally managed. The more normal, functionally oriented, organization manages the activities in terms of what is optimal for the function, which may be counter to the needs of the individual product. Consumer Orientation. A most important, though indirect, marketing outcome is that the product manager typically becomes well aware of the consumer‘s needs and preferences since that manager is continually at the focus of all the product-oriented information (much of which originates from consumers). The resulting activities, which will mainly be in the marketing area, thus tend to be more consumer-oriented than in most other management structures (often more so than in other marketing-oriented structures). It is for this reason that `brand management‘ often results in better marketing. [[2]]
The product management function is responsible for defining the products in the marketing mix. Product management typically deals with:
Product management may also represent an organization‘s approach to the process of managing and marketing its products and services as smaller businesses inside the larger enterprise, supported by multi-function product teams (led by product managers) and a standard product development process.
Product management typically deals with all of the end-to-end aspects of a product or product line including product profitability, the role may be split with closely related functions Product marketing, program management, and project management.
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