Executive Summary

In this report, the new product development and innovative attempts of Bellamy’s Organic have been evaluated along with the new product development process and the factors affecting NPD framework. Product Quality and Product Uniqueness are the main assets of Bellamy’s Organic; therefore these two factors have been discussed under the product related factors. The concentration of target market and competitive pressure were discussed under market related factors. Bellamy’s Organic has many strengths and weaknesses within the industry that they operate. Both success factors and issues of Bellamy’s Organic were analyzed and improvement opportunities were provided in order to face the challenges and increase the market share. Secondary data sources such as websites, annual reports, blogs, etc. have been used for the analysis. The extensive analysis has identified strengths and weaknesses of the Bellamy’s NPD initiatives whilst referring to the critical success factors and issues within the context of the business. Finally, recommendations were given to improve the NPD process and thereby achieve a strong competitive position within the industry.

1. Introduction

New product development is a set of activities that a company is carrying out when they generate, modify and launch a new product to the market. This is a great tool in winning the market competition through delivering more value and driving sales by creating more excitement around the brand. Further, new product development provides opportunities to explore new technologies and analyze consumer trends.
Bellamy’s Organic is Tasmanian originated company which is focused on providing organic and healthy nutrition choices for babies and young children. Bellamy’s Organic was founded in 2004 and offer over 30 products ranging from birth to early stages of childhood. With the growing competition, Bellamy’s Organics has started to focus on new product development and product improvement to provide new customer experience and retain them with the company. “Organic baby porridge” is the main cash generating product of the company; hence marketing team and production team jointly contribute for further developing the product by introducing new flavors and textures to the product. The company currently offers baby porridge in apple, cinnamon and banana flavors and these flavors already have a high demand. This growing demand for “Organic Baby Porridge” has led the production team to focus on advancing the product through innovation (Bellamy’s Organic, 2018).
As identified in the Ansoff’s growth matrix, innovation and new product development support two main strategies namely product development and diversification. According to Johnson and Scholes (2008), innovation and product development are crucial to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage

2. New Product Development

New product development can be identified as a process of conceptualizing, designing, developing and marketing a freshly generated product. The main focus of developing a new product is to conserve and grow the market share of the company while delighting the customer. This process of developing a new product involves a lot of thinking and market intelligence (Kotler et al., 2014). However, it is important to follow a formal process as it requires discipline, commitment and consistency to introduce a new product to the market. Development of a new product is directly and indirectly related to the core function, goals and objectives of the company. Therefore the product strategy of the company combines the process of designing and developing a new product with the objectives and overall strategic direction of the business (Tipvarakarnkoon et al., 2017).
Generating the idea of developing a product which is in line with the product strategy and company objectives is the most important aspect of the process. The idea or the concept should be analyzed in addition to the profitability / ROI analysis of the suggested idea for a product. The development of the product and conducting commercial experiments are done in advance to the launch of the product.