Development of Innovation Products Based on the Consumers' Preferences

Abstract

The today's tendency to produce goods that are similar in terms of their quality, destined to satisfy the same customers' needs, have some unnecessary functions complicates consumers' choice, decreases their satisfaction. The aim of the paper is to investigate the Russian consumer preferences as the basis of the innovation product development besides company's competences. The Russian producers' and consumers' positions don't coincide in the evaluation of key factors for successful goods promotion at the consumer market (H1). It's our contention that participation of consumers in innovation product development brings it in correspondence with the consumer preferences thus ensures more success at consumer market. We believe that the most efficient forms of involvement of Russian consumers as innovation products 'co-manufacturers' are selfservice and conditions creation when the consumer could resolve a problem independently (H2). The object of the survey was two commodities (clothes and foodstuffs). Data was collected using a panel of 150 companies located in the Ural Federal District in Russia that developed more than 300 innovation products during the last ten years; some of them were developed with consumers' participation, some of them without it. 1200 consumers and 150 companies' representatives were interviewed by mean of a semi-structured questionnaire. Based on the collected database, the authors track some certain dependence between the consumers' participation in the value creation process and the innovation goods promotion to the consumer market. The findings indicate that consumers' participation in the innovation products development may be organised in different ways, and it significantly increases the sales volume (in 45% on average) and consumer satisfaction.