Surprisingly, professionally conducted NPD can also cause discussions to turn into
debates about problematic characteristics. As mentioned, the implicit idea of
packaging held by the brand owners was to follow the dominant design in the ready
meals food market. The consultant brought new ideas to build a distinctive and
distinguishable brand through a novel package design. However, the brand owners did
not support this strategy or its new ideas. This resulted in justification and counter
argumentation rounds between various representatives of participating organisations.
Some of them took a biased stance against the packaging designer, others backed up
the distinctive design as being innovative. This is an example of a clique of
professionals having power over other participants in a NPD project. The result in the
case was a partial withdrawal of the pack-designer. Consequently, she partly copied
the package design that followed the original idea of the brand owners.