Know-How Exchange : Strategy

There are numerous ways to approach this. I'd start by carefully defining the primary target audience and speaking with a small sample of that audience -- perhaps 10-12 people. Ask about current habits and practices, attitudes and awareness of brands/products, likes/dislikes with current solutions, etc.

Depending on what you learn you can then structure a quantitative study among a broader sample and move to some concept testing. If there are similar products on the market in other countries, you can see if there are parallel characteristics in your market(s) and use those as additional benchmarks.

If this seems beyond your capability, there are consultants/researchers who have extensive experience with this sort of thing. It may be worth your time and expense to engage with one.

Consumer products range from relatively cheap and simple products (such as a shoe horn) to complex, sophisticated products (such as mobile phones). The market potential and the promotional strategy adopted to take specific products to market is heavily dependent, as my colleague Michael Goodman says, on habits and practices, attitudes and awareness of brands/products, likes/dislikes with current solutions. These can also change with the differences between cheaper and more expensive versions of the same product. You haven't provided any information on your product or indeed, if it has differing versions across a wide range of selling prices.

My recommendation is that you need to conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis of your retail competitors that can lead into an effective SWOT analysis. That seems to me to be a fundamental action on your part to set a benchmark for the development of a future course of action. You need to know where you sit in the hierarchy of retailers in your field. Only then can you determine the structure of your most effective business model and its accompanying marketing strategy.

It is very difficult for us at KHE to suggest future courses of action without knowing the details of your actual situation. It would be most helpful if you could advise what specific actions you have taken to resolve your perceived difficulty, along with any actions you may have tried to implement without success.

There's not a one-size-fits-all analysis that could work for your situation. You could start by reviewing your company's previous analyses for other offerings. Or, understand your company's decision-making processes for reviewing an analysis. Decision makers might want interviews, historical data, competitive analyses, focus groups, mock ups, or even Kickstarter-like experiments. It all depends...

Find an existing market in which your product will stand out against competing products because it does a better job of solving an existing problem. Resist the temptation to compare your product to other products and avoid calling it the Uber of this or the Netflix of that.