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June 2004
Build, Buy, or Partner: How to Speed Your Time-to-Market
By Deborah Henken, Highland Marketing and Norma Watenpaugh, Phoenix Consulting
Product marketing, management, and development departments are pressured from
all sides to add competitive differentiation to their products, fill gaps in
product lines, and offer complete solutions. They have three strategies to
choose from when addressing these issues:
- Build from scratch
- Buy components, products, or companies
- Partner with other companies
When deciding which of these strategies makes the most sense, you should always
start with the customer. There are two tools that put the customer at the center,
allowing you to analyze your choices and determine the one that will work best
for your situation:
- The whole-product approach requires you to examine what
customers demand in the product (features, services, support, ease of
purchasing, installation,
whatever the demand might be). This then enables you to determine whether
it’s
best to meet all of the needs internally or to partner with or purchase
other companies instead.
- The product-adoption lifecycle model enables you
to evaluate where a product is in the adoption cycle (early or late adopters,
majority, or laggards)
and
then map the best way to bring the product to market by matching channels
to each stage.
The full white paper on this topic is available for download in Adobe Portable
Document Format (PDF) and details the following:
- The benefits and tradeoffs
of the whole-product approach and the product-adoption lifecycle
- The
objectives you should analyze when determining which approach best fits
your company’s and customers’ needs
- How to use each strategy to
assess your situation
Build, Buy, or Partner: How to Speed Your Time-to-Market white paper (PDF
182KB)
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