8....The Research Pt 2
Oh noooooo....not more research. Well yes, sorry, lots more research. We have just got to get this bit right.
So we have established some general information about our market, but we now need to get a lot more specific and use all that information we have collected.
These are the questions you will need to answer.
1.What is our market group? Consumer, proffessional or industrial? If its the last two, skip ahead to question 7.
2.Is our market influenced by personal factors? Age, sex, family size, marital status?
3.Is location important to our market? How far will they travel to us?
4.Consider socio economic factors. Does our product appeal to a particular class of people? This will have a major bearing on how much we can charge.
5.Consider other social factors. Is out product likely to appeal to an exclusive clientele, a mass market, do our customers look for the latest trends?
6.Where do our potential customers buy? Local shops, supermarkets, mail order? Is this an opportunity to provide a unique service.
7.If we are selling to an industry or proffesion can we specialise in one area. For example, maybe our widget is medical, should be concentrate on local GP's?
8.How big are the companies we are selling to? This will influence the size of our business. If our business is going to run by one person and our first customer is a major national retailer, we could have problems supplying. Should we target smaller business's?
9.Will price be a major factor to the business's we are targeting.
10.How important will after sales service be to our customers. This could be an opportunity for product distinction.
Hopefully we have managed to answer all of these questions and we now have a good idea who are target market is.
They might be young, wealthy, single people or families with limited means. Perhaps we have identified that our product will appeal to small local business's who require onsite support every now and then. Whatever the results, we should now have a pretty good idea whether there is a market for our product and if so, who that market is and how much they are likely to buy.
We should also know who our competitors will be and how we will differentiate our product from theirs.
Well done!
