How well do you know
your product?

by Frank Burke

Whether you manufacture park benches or workbenches, pig feeders or pig iron, looking at your product from a different perspective can be a rewarding and profitable experience in strategic marketing planning.  The key is how you look at what it is you make.  Very often, surrounded by our products on a day-to-day basis and talking consistently with the same customers, we tend to develop  “tunnel vision.” 

A simple creative exercise can help determine whether the present product is viable in the mid to long term and whether there might be other uses to which it can be applied.

Look at your product.

Ask yourself the following questions: What is it?  What is it for?  How do your customers use it? And, what business are you in, really?

Take a look at an old reliable product, the molding machine. In many automotive, medical and other industry applications, the molding machine now does what machine tools once did.  What has changed in your business in the last two years that could exert a similar effect on your product line?

	Frank Burke is president of Burke & Towner, Ltd, a marketing communica-tions and consulting company specializing in indus-trial/technical products and services. Burke holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and writes extensively on metalworking and manufacturing. He can be reached at frank.b@burkeandtowner.com

Redesign your product by turning it around

Should the back be the front?  Machines that require an operator are generally loaded from the front and serviced from the side.  If they cut metal, chip evacuation is usually also from the side.  When those same machines are utilized in an automated production set-up, it may be more desirable to place lubrication, servicing areas and chip conveyors, and possibly computer controls, in the back.

Or….turning it upside down

How would it affect the product to use or operate it in an inverted manner?  If a machining center could