New Service Development: A Case Study for the Swedish Supermarket Chain ICA

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 2,3, Karlstad University, course: New Service Development, language: English, abstract: Table of Content

(I) List of Figures and Tables 2

1. Introduction 3

1.1 Background and Purpose 3

1.2 Aim 3

1.3 Methodology 3

2. Authors Process Steps 4

3. Description of the Concept Finding for ICA 5

3.1 Service Maintenance 6

3.2 Improve Service Performance 7

3.3 Service Innovation 8

3.4 Description of the Innovations used for a New ICA Concept 9

3.4.1 Improvement of the Package 9

3.4.2 Customer Roles and Interaction 9

4. Strategy Description for ICA 11

4.1 The Product Journey 11

4.2 Customer Involvement 12

4.3 Summarization of the Strategy 14

5. Conclusion 15

(II) References 16

The challenge which many companies have to face nowadays is to stay competitive at the market. According to Gustafsson and Johnson (2003), New Service Development can be used to achieve a competitive advantage and compete through services. Thereby, the term of New Service Development (abbreviated as NSD) gets into focus of companies to emphasize their own offerings of those from their competitors. The question remains what steps are involved in the process of NSD and how companies can achieve a successful service development. One major influence within NSD is the customer and their knowledge provided for firms. Customer involvement in the different service development steps of a company belongs nowadays to the day-to-day business of many companies and provide customer focused products remains a crucial part of this. (Alam, 2006)

Within this report the change process of a supermarket (ICA) from a normal good-dominant grocery store to a more service-dominant business is lined out. The dy-namic process of NSD is described via own product experiences combined with NSD theories. The last step is the strategy development for ICA. The strategy aims to achieve a competitive advantage and ensure the company growth.