Strategic Product Management in an Economic Recession
Duration: 3 days
Target Audience: Product management teams, including those that interact with the product management team such as marketing and product innovation teams.
Key Learning Outcomes
- Manage products with a restricted budget and reduced demand.
- Explore how to prioritise the product portfolio to survive in the short term, and to adjust strategies to build, hold, harvest and divest products.
- Discover how to niche products to minimise the effect of increased competition and identify higher value opportunities.
- Understand the repositioning of products and services to restore profitability, minimise price cutting and restore value.
- Know how to spend selectively to get the optimum return and avoid non-essential competitive action.
- Create a crisis plan to support struggling products and set the foundations for fast recovery after recession.
Course Delivery Includes:
- Theory: Latest best practice and leading edge ideas
- Team discussions and exercises
- Case studies
- Technique application practice
- Business problem solving
- Personal action planning
Course Outline: Strategic Product Management in an Economic Recession
DAY 1
Understanding Strategic and Tactical Product Marketing Options
Identifying the business strategy options available and their effect on product strategy
How strategy may need to change
Establishing a new strategy
Understanding the need for tactical action
Avoiding strategic damage
Understanding the New Environment
Understanding the business cycle
Recognising key indicators of recession and recovery
Identifying market factors and their potential impact on product management
Implementing structured competitor analysis
Recognising competitive strategies and actions
Tactical and strategic market segmentation
Identifying the new key success factors in your market
Foundations of Product Planning
Establishing the principles of the business and how they will guide planning in the recession
Assessing product lifecycles and the effect upon them
Identifying the key drivers of product success or failure
Re-setting product objectives
DAY 2
Reducing costs through segmentation and targeting
Avoiding wastage in segmentation and targeting
The key issues to consider in segmentation
Segmentation options
Targeting in a recession
Cutting the cost of targeting
Understanding how customers react in a recession
Customer behaviour
Key decision making influences
Who is influencing decisions
How it will affect Product Marketing strategy
Managing the customer base in a recession
Identifying which customers really matter
Prioritising the offer for different types of customer
How to reduce the cost of customers as part of your strategy
Creating and altering the product marketing mix
Understanding which tools which can be applied
Which tools work best in a recession
Maximising synergy of the tools
Developing an appropriate and consistent Product Marketing Mix
DAY 3
Product portfolio management
Selecting the right portfolio
Assessing the attractiveness of various strategies
Determining appropriate strategy for each product
Maximising the limited budget available
Developing maintaining or revising the positioning strategy
What positioning is and how it is determined
Managing positioning in a recession
Pitfalls to be avoided
Creating a strategic and tactical product marketing plan
How to approach the planning process
What the plan should contain
Setting and meeting objectives
Defining actions, responsibilities and timescales
Determining the budget
Evaluating the success of the product marketing plan
The priority created by recession
Establishing the right measurement criteria
Building the control system
How to measure results and guide actions