Best practices of a global product launch
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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en
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87
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Abstract
How to ensure the product launch success? This is the question on top of managers’ minds and for a good reason: while being one of the costliest parts in the new product development process, the product launches and their performance are the cornerstone of any company’s long-term profitability. When defining a product launch strategy, companies have to consider various strategic and tactical decisions and activities from the product development process to pricing and distribution. In addition, the ever-increasing globalisation has added various matters to take into account. Companies operating in multiple business regions need to balance between local preferences and benefits of standardisation, while managing the vast international network of knowledge and operations. While product launch processes have been rather widely researched topic, launches in a global setting as well as the human side of product launch management have not received as much academic attention. To fill the gap, this master’s thesis describes both strategic and tactical decisions of a global product launch process and examines their possible effects on the product launch performance. The dependent variables chosen to represent the decisions are inter-regional cooperation, market information gathering activities, marketing mix, timings and level of localisation. The purpose of the study is to contribute to the research on product launch processes and to support companies to recognise and to improve actions that are crucial for success. The data was collected through a survey distributed among the marketing and sales departments of a large multinational consumer goods company, operating across the globe. In the survey, the employees of the company were asked to rate in retrospect the execution of different product launch activities as well as the performance of the chosen launch. The sample included 80 responses in total from six different business areas. To evaluate the proposed framework, the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used as the main quantitative analysis method. To further examine the importance of individual indicators, a surrogate variable analysis (SVA) was conducted. The results show the remarkable importance of the marketing mix to the product launch success. Out of the individual elements, appropriate pricing has the greatest effect on the launch performance, followed by promotion. When it comes to managing the international network, the results indicate that inter-regional cooperation may actually hurt the benefit gained from market research gathering activities.Description
Thesis advisor
Kajalo, SamiFalk, Tomas