Leveraging Social Media for New Product Development: A Review

Communication is a vehicle used by the marketer in order to inform, remind and persuade the consumer about their products, services or brands they sell. In other words, marketing communication epitomize the voice of the company. The world of communication has experienced a gradual change and this change can be attributed as a result of the movement from the traditional World Wide Web (WWW) to Web 2.0 state of technologies. One of the discernible changes is the communication ways used by the customer to communicate among themselves or the organizations communicating with their customers. Social media can be referred as one of the medium of this change. These online virtual spaces provide a platform to the users to interact, collaborate and share the content. The present study tries to elucidate the use of social media as a platform to develop new product and services. Also, it tries to present an insight into the various phases of new product development (NPD) where social media can be used to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. The study explores the different areas, where the work has been done by different researchers and tries to find the gap in the related past studies.