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Contact the brand manager, discuss what is their strategy, the target market, and analyze does ATL marketing or BTL Marketing will benefit the product.
Preparing a plan for the new product introduction is a relatively straightforward process that, while not easy, is nevertheless a worthwhile investment in your business success.
Step1: Create your Mission Statement. What is the vision of your business? What are its objectives, goals and aspirations? And most importantly: how does your new product align with these
Step2: Analyze your Target Customers. Who are your customers? What motivates them to buy your new product? What are their perceptions of value? By carefully understanding your target customers, you position your product into their world – because you can have the “latest and greatest” product available, but if it doesn’t fit a customer need or solve a customer problem, it won’t win their business.
3: Analyze your Target Markets. Categorize your customers in terms of practical and useful groups, such as by industry, geography, vertical, and so on. Appreciate the fine distinctions between how these different target markets will perceive, evaluate and demand your product.
Step4: Scope out the Competition. Even if your product is a major advancement on what your competitors are offering, don’t assume that you’re going to blow them out of the water. Rather, perform a careful analysis of your competitors’ operations. Learn how they position, price and distribute their products. Also pay attention to their marketing to see how they both respond and react to market changes.
Step5: Position your Product. Based on the insights and information gleaned from the above steps, focus specifically on your new product and analyze its position. How is it different from what’s available? How is it the same?
Step6: Create your Action Plan. Here’s where you’ll take everything from steps1 through5 and put it into a structured action plan – which, in effect, will be a project. Many products “lose their way” on the way to market. This is either because too much time was spent in one or more steps, or more often, not enough time in one or more steps.
Step7: Execute your Action Plan. After all of the hard work invested in the previous steps – especially step6 – it’s time to hit the switch and execute your action plan. It’s fine to spend a few weeks on market research or performing a S.W.O.T. analysis.
Some Final Words Spending time and in some cases money and other resources on each of the7 steps above may be a challenge – especially if you’re eager and enthusiastic about getting your product to market, and don’t want to be bogged down by research, plans and project management. Furthermore, you may not want to “waste time” preparing to introduce your product if there’s a spectacular opportunity for you to win customers from your competition. All of this makes sense, and the advice here isn’t to spend months on end planning and preparing your product for market. Rather, the advice here is to impress upon you that once your product is launched, trying to “go back in time” and take care of any of these steps is risky, costly and can be fraught with quality problems. In other words, the old adage “an hour of planning saves a week of correction” most certainly applies.
