PRNewser's Joe Ciarallo interviewed David Steel, SVP of marketing at Samsung, about merging communications and product development. This practice (or theory) is also the subject of Alex Bogusky and John Winsor's "Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves".

Steel, who met with PRNewser at a panel called "The Reinvention Economy: Re-casting Communications as a Critical Corporate Innovator" today in New York, discusses a topic you've heard before: the benefits of getting consumer feedback in real time. With technology in particular, it's increasingly difficult to stay ahead of the curve because products become obsolete so quickly. Marrying communications and development can, in some cases, lengthen a product's life by getting it to market faster.

And although this idea may seem simple, corporate infrastructure can inhibit the switch from theory to practice.

"When we hit the ground with a new product, we need real feedback from consumers that there's real demand, real interest, [to know] what appeals to them," said Steel. "So this new paradigm of communications allows us to do that, because we can hear what consumers are saying about our products and technology in essentially real time, what they're saying to each other as well as what they're saying back to us as a brand. So a lot of these techniques and tools in social media and online marketing allow us to get consumer input very early in our product development process and then we can reflect that in new products that are coming out. It's a very powerful new tool for us."

Advertising related? No. But as problem solvers, you are constantly seeking to understand the full extent of a problem. Only then can you hope to find the answers your client needs — and will pay for you to fix.

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