New product success starts with a solid foundation built on the following four pillars of new product success:
- Research – Fully understanding your market
- Marketing – A commitment to the consumer
- Financial – Getting the money right
- Vision – A clear view of what success looks like
In a four-part series of posts, we will explore each pillar and how you can use it to maximize your efforts and results. If you haven’t read it already, click here for the introduction and Pillar One.
Pillar 2 : Marketing : Commitment to the Consumer
Who is the target consumer for your product?
In other words, who do you plan to sell your product to? For your new product to be successful, you must be an expert on your consumer. It is imperative to understand your consumer fully and to have a working knowledge of what that consumer looks like, where they shop, demographics, and income among other factors.
The reasons for this are quite simple.
First, it will help you to build a marketing strategy for your brand that specifically addresses a solution or an unmet consumer need. By understanding the need and how your new product is a solution for that need, you are one step closer to convincing the buyer of the relevance of your new product. Most importantly, why it has a place in their stores.
Second, it provides credibility for your company with the buyer.
Taking it one step further, by matching your core consumer to the store’s target demographic, you can reduce buyer resistance and get closer to a ‘yes’.
By identifying the target consumer, you are now able to construct a suitable advertising plan to educate, inform, and drive consumers to the store. The ad plan must be relevant and designed to target your core consumer with compelling offers and aspirations that will help build brand awareness and brand equity. The ad plan should be formidable as well. That is, it should be supported by a reasonable amount of funding resources. Budgets should be developed that are based on intended investments or as a percentage of projected sales.
To get to know your target consumer, we often suggest test marketing. Test marketing can simply be executed online with well-known shopping platforms or via your own website store. There are also several live-environment retail accelerators available to further test consumer preferences and understand how they react to your brand, pricing, promotion, and packaging. Whichever method is chosen, be sure to capture all available data metrics and points of analysis. Relevant data is important for decision-making across the entire scope of your launch and further as you expand your retail distribution footprint.