Consumers’ Views of R&D Initiatives Taken by Organisations: Reactions Towards ‘R&D’ Shown in Advertisements

Abstract

Value is the summation of perceived tangible and intangible benefits and costs for customers. High product value is based on perceptions of product attributes; this perception of product attributes is built gradually. For instance, a brand’s features could be perceived as being better than others. Combining R&D and Marketing would help strengthen the favourable perceptions of customers towards a brand, and mitigate the unfavourable perceptions for the same, by way of telling marketers the pulse of the ‘market’ for their product. Also, there exists a Value Deviation between the brand image that the company wants to project (core positioning) and the value that the customer wants. This is simply because of the inability of the marketer to influence various core business processes, like Operations, HR, R&D etc., wherein R&D helps in key processes like market sensing and new offer realizations, which are crucial for value creation. Just as the marketing concept developed on the premise of ‘buyer’s market’, as Theodore Lewitt stated (one has to make products that suit the buyers, and not find buyers to suit one’s product), R&D too has now evolved as being the primary tool to be used by marketers to first collect information about their target audience, and then accordingly create value for them, and not vice-versa. After all, competitive advantage can be sustained only when value is delivered as promised to the customer, and R&D is THE tool for doing just that.

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