Is your product market-ready?

In a highly competitive environment, having a product is not enough.

Your product needs a customized marketing program. Just-right tactics can only be created with an in-depth understanding of your target customers, the competitive situation, and a working knowledge of the causes and effects of various communications tactics – at Hale! Marketing, we call that being “Seven P’s” market-ready.

Is Your Product Market-Ready?

If businesses could succeed by simply designing and producing a product, and waiting for the product to sell itself, then many more companies would be successful. All too often promising start-ups, and larger companies too, focus on defining just-right product feature sets, employing the latest technology, or re-designing the same products at reduced cost. And all too often, the marketing “program” is tagged on as an afterthought, squeezed between the prototype that finally works and first customer shipment, and squeezed between spending more R&D dollars and maximizing the return to investors.

When you’ve put so much effort into developing a great product, you don’t want to be disappointed by poor sales. The truth is, people have lived without many products and services until now. If you’ve got a great product, then it is worth just as much marketing effort to promote it as it took to develop the product in the first place. Not only will you realize a more rapid return, but you will capture and retain a far greater market share well into the future.

Good marketing blends customer acquisition and customer retention. Developing a marketing program with the right mix can be as complex as developing a product, and not many companies have the necessary expertise to carry it off. But without a well-designed program your product is not market-ready for product launch or for sustained success.

Here’s some pointers to get your program and your product off to a good start and to keep it ahead.

Planning with the seven “P’s”

To build your program, you need to get some basic “P’s” nailed down. Product, positioning, pricing, and promotion are common terms used in marketing. But we have found that to be successful, you need to: understand the customer as a Person, understand the Problem they need to solve, define the value Proposition, clarify product Positioning, determine product Pricing, decide your program Priorities, and finally, construct the Promotion campaign.