I am back in product development. I did product development for about a decade, had three years doing something else, and now I'm back. And back, I have been impressed anew with confidence and originality's overriding importance to product appeal. In good times and bad, people will buy your offerings if they are truly new products that you can sell with full confidence in them.

The textbooks say that marketing is a question of discerning what the market wants, producing it, getting it to market, and selling it. But there is such a proliferation -- such a glut -- of products on the market today that not even consumers know what they want. And if they don't know, how is a manufacturer supposed to discern this? All the market research in the world is not going to illuminate wants that are still unformed. It is impossible to tell with certainty what the future holds.

Which makes it all the more important that market-sensitive manufacturers do their own thinking and create innovative goods and services that they "know" are right and that they are committed to. If we do, our products will be convincing and our work sustainably satisfying. That is my goal.

Funawatari Tomohiko

Kirin Brewery