Terracog Business Case Study

TerraCog was skilled at converting word-of-the-mouth customer recommendations into excellent product design and functionality and combined with their deep understanding of specialty retailers’ needs, they outperformed competing GPS navigation products. Their proprietary firmware provided more precise navigation over competing products, and combined by their excellent addressal of customer needs, they surpassed their competitors’ products, even when they were not the first to market. One of their competitors’ products, BirdsI, was launched in October 2006 as “the only handheld GPS with satellite imagery”. Their assessment of product and a wrong estimation of their core customers’ demands made them reject the idea of a similar product, whereas BirdsI had an exclusive launch at two of their outdoor retailers.

Not until spring 2007 did they press for making the product, because of increasing customer demand for a product like BirdsI, and the hit TerraCog would take because of the missed sales targets after changing the compensation plan of Sales team. Responding to Ed Pryor’s (VP, Sales) continued requests, Richard Fiero (President) reluctantly agreed to make a similar product, dubbed Project Aerial. In the meeting with Allen Roth (Director, Design and Development), Cory Wu (Manager, Software and Firmware Design) and Alice Gorga (Manager, Hardware Design), Pryor and Fiero decided to compromise on the speed over graphics and to redesign within their existing platform to avoid extra costs. They estimated product design to finish by end of 2007 and get Aerial to stores by 2008 holidays, so that they could try to regain their lost market share even though they were entering 2 years late in the market. The production development team wasn’t very happy with the decision, because they had other interesting ideas that could help the company capitalize on growth in new markets. They also thought extending the deadline by 6 months would help them develop a better product and challenge them technically.

Emma Richardson (Executive Vice President), overlooking the product launch, called a pre-launch meeting on 7th March 2007, with 3 other departments (Sales, Production, Design and Development). She was determined to finalize decisions on costs, pricing and initial production volume, and was afraid the size of the group was larger than other