New Product Marketing and Consumer Innovative Behaviour:a study of the Greek market

Abstract

Business firms are increasingly recognising that the key to their survival and growth lies in the continuous development of new and improved products. Gone is the confidence that established products will maintain strong market positions indefinitely. Assuming all these, and in the first part of my thesis, I will examine the sources from which new product ideas can be produced in a company. In the second part, an effort has been made to concentrate in a few pages a vast bulk of material covering the existing literature on consumer behaviour theories. Great attention has been paid to that, because of its significance to the whole subject, but particularly because of its importance to understand the role of the consumer in the innovation process. Half of the third part is theoretical, while the rest of it is practical. In the beginning, and in order to prove that - at least in Greece - the consumer based invention is the most effective one, I found it necessary to comment on the consumer based techniques of generating new product ideas. Then the field research is presented and its results giving an image of how things work in a limited area of the Greek market. Under modern conditions of competition, it is becoming increasingly risky not to innovate. Consumers and industrial customers want and expect a stream of new and improved products. Competition will certainly do its best to meet these desires. Continuous innovation seems to be the only way to avert obsolescence of the company's product line. The innovation process, in combination with the consumers' attitudes in this field, is the subject of the last part of the thesis.