Research Of Product Family Planning

With the increasing living standard, user needs often tend to be diversified and personalized, then their purchase behaviors and buying habits changing in accordance with the income level, personal preference and personal requirements. The insisting requirements needs to be meet with corresponding products, companies had better develop different products for different needs, in another words, the new products put into the market in the form of family rather than individual subject, then here comes the conception of product family.On the one hand, in face of the diversified user requirements, if the company caters to user needs blindly as much as possible, without considering its own capacity and strategic planning, it always make the product family too big to manage. Such complex one is difficult to sustain business goals. On the other hand, if the company only considers their own technical ability, production capacity, and on the basis of the existing product platform for new products developing, it tends to produce something that out of user needs, what can’t satisfied the user would be failed. A perfect planning always means everything, so in front of building product family,the product family planning play an irreplaceable role.In 1950s, society began to make the transition to information age, stepped into the third wave civilization, which represented with intelligent electronic products; in 1990s, with the exponential growth of information, it greatly enhance the relationship between human and electrical products, people rely on any information more than before, so here comes the needs about using them in mobile scenarios, the development of electronic products tend to be mobile and portable. Now with the development of high integrated hardware technology, ultra miniaturization and the increasingly popularization of information technology, the former expensive products tends to consumer electronic products. The smart phone is the best evidence of this phenomenon, which close to our life most tightly. Then the research object of this paper choose the most representative Galaxy product family, research the meaning of product family planning through the spring up of Galaxy.Due to product family planning is a relatively new field, the developed research is not rich now, then this article attempts to do this research from the perspective of marketing, using PEST/SWOT/Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model as assisted analysis tools to build product family planning system. Firstly, dividing the company products system into six levels (from macroscopic to microcosmic), product group, product category, product family, product line, product generation and products variety, then focused on the two levels, product family and product line. The basis of product family planning is Positioning, starting at selecting the target market (market positioning), then offer corresponding product family (product positioning), at last, completing the whole process in a systematic way of thinking.