One is corporate marketing, which is for the development of sales-support materials, advertising, marcom, as well as corporate positioning. Then there is market development, for which the responsibilities of developing and positioning new products lie. In high technology, there can be no separation of marketing and development forces. Bob Graham once said, “Development should be so closely linked that it is essentially a tactical arm of marketing.” If you look at the best companies they use this method. Product development efforts often start with a tiger team that is headed by a senior executive who may have a technical title, but will be doing market development. These senior executives usually have emerged from development with substantial and successful experience in bringing new products to market. They can also come from the customer base. In either case, success or failure will largely be measured by the level to which the executive has mastered equipment development, applications development, product marketing, and has strong relationships with key customers. Since most market development executives come from the development side, the last two on the list are where most fail and a few succeed brilliantly.
