Product Development and Market Governance tion. The responses of the consumers at the outlets can be collected in a structured questionnaire or fed directly in the computer. The controlled test marketing allows the company to test the impact of retail response as well as the buying behavior of the consumers. Commercialization of the prod- uct is a strategic decision in which the company should look into the appropriate time, market and consumer segment to launch the product. The company has to derive the geographical strategy with the logistics administration approaches. The time of launch of the product may be considered looking into three common choice ­ maiden entry or first look in the market, parallel entry with the similar or identical product of the competing brand and late entry when the firm delays positioning its product in the selected segment. The commer- cialization process of the product also prompts the adoption behaviour of the consumers. There are five stages in the adoption process ­ awareness about the product, interest generated in using or adopting the product, evaluation of the product, trial of the product from the point of perceived use value and perceived price, and final adoption of the product for use. techniques has been a basic tool of the applied marketing research profession for over twenty years now. It is one of the few advanced mul- tivariate techniques that have not suffered very much from alternating waves of popularity and disfavor. Although these techniques have been used extensively over a large number of applied research studies, for a very wide variety of product and service categories, and have been subjected to extensive validations, there still remain some very basic issues as to the procedure's applica- bility and usefulness. In addition, there remain many outstanding issues concerning the proper procedures and algorithms that should be used for perceptual mapping. There are varied but similar procedures of documenting cognitive dimensions of consumers as well as other players in the product develop- ment process. Some of them are as listed below: · · · · · · · · · · · Perceptual Mapping Preference Mapping Market Mapping Structural Segmentation Product Mapping Brand Mapping Goal Mapping Behavioral Mapping Image Mapping Strategic Product Positioning, and Semantic Mapping PERCEPTUAL MAPPING FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Ideation process for new products development is also effectively managed by the customer centric companies through mapping the consumer per- ceptions about their needs and expected products. Perceptual mapping is one of the few marketing research techniques that provide direct input into the strategic marketing planning process. It allows senior marketing planners to take a broad view of the strengths and weaknesses of their product or service offerings relative to the strengths and weaknesses of their competition. It allows the marketing planner to view the customer and the competitor simultaneously in the same realm. Perceptual mapping and preference mapping Recent advances in economics can be used to build perceptual maps into market models that can predict the demand for new products and to evaluate the profitability of alternative designs, information on competitive reactions and costs must be added to market models. Recent advances in facility location analysis can then be exploited to perform optimization analyses to support decision- making. The most promising approach involves discrete optimization (Schmalensee and Thisse, 1988). Managers need to follow the sequential steps in determining the perceptual map. 95