New Product Development

INTRODUCTION

For any company, to maintain an already established brand name is as equally a challenging task as the creation of the brand. In today’s challenging market environment, any business is expected to continuously focus on organizational learning and continuous improvement and introduction of products and services to stay alive in the market.

Continuous learning helps organizations to identify gap between the current business and areas which could be tapped with the help of existing knowledge of the market which is close to our existing area of focus. This fits to services businesses as well as products businesses. Where there is a solution to a problem, there is the prospect for a business.

One of the many ways of continuous improvement of the business is product/service diversification. It is the key to any organization to be successful in its market. Sometime it acts as a key to survive and some time it acts a necessity for gaining competitive advantage over other companies in the market. Often this is possible through Innovation.

This article discusses on Luxottica S.p.A (Luxottica)’s effort in diversifying its successful and premium brand Ray Ban from its sun glasses business to eye care and solutions. Also it analyses current market position of Luxottica and more specifically Ray Ban, and discusses its current strategy in introducing products and services, efforts on innovation and the feasibilities and business prospects of the latest product idea ‘Ray Blendz’ developed by the company’s Research and Development (R&D) team.

I have used various research methodologies which focus mainly on the following: 1. Should the ‘Ray Blenz’ be developed as a separate brand i.e, as one among Ray Ban’s core products or just a technology which would be incorporated with its existing products? 2. How much the new product would add value to existing product portfolio? 3. Its effect on Ray Ban’s brand. 4. Future prospects of the

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