You might think your product or service will sweep the market away, but without having a foundation of information about your customer’s wants and needs, you can’t know if your product will do well.
Thousands of new products launch every month. Yet only a fraction of those gets enough traction to be considered successful.
Knowing whether or not your product will sell is one of the biggest questions in marketing. You might think your product or service will sweep the market away, but without having a foundation of information about your customer’s wants and needs, you can’t know if your product will do well.
In this article, we explore the concept of product marketability and ways to know whether your product is marketable.
What Is Product Marketability?
Marketability is essentially a measure of whether a product will appeal to buyers and sell at a set price range to generate a profit.
Marketing techniques include public relations, advertising, trade shows, collateral production, and other functions such as product quality assurance and documentation.
Product developers should complete a marketability evaluation before attempting to market products. Doing so helps marketing managers and other executives determine whether the product is marketable in the current and future market.
4 Ways to Know if Your Product is Marketable
When starting a business one of the big questions you’ll want the answer to is, “How can I know if my product will sell?”
There are several ways to know if your product will sell before creating it. These methods don’t guarantee success but will dramatically increase your odds.
Conduct Market Research
Researching to determine if there is a market for your business is key to successfully selling your product.
We recommend you do some market research before devoting too much time and money to the business. Conducting market research can help you learn how many consumers or businesses could use the product. Once you’ve determined the demand for your product, ensure that it can be made and supplied at a low enough cost that your retail pricing is affordable. It can also help you assess your competitors, which will exist regardless of how unique you believe your innovation is.
Listen to the Market
If you are in the business world, you need to accept that customers in the market determine the fate of your company’s success. Customers have the final word when determining whether an item is purchased or not. Getting to know the market before you begin selling your product can give a clearer outline of what you will experience.
Once you have a better understanding of the market you are about to dive into, you can make better business decisions on how to approach the market.
Your target customer should serve the base upon which all other concepts are built. After all, your consumer determines your product’s success.
Test Your Product
Some of the biggest companies test their products before introducing the product to an entire market. You can create a prototype and begin with small testing either online or in select stores. It will help you answer questions to a degree that research may not. Getting customer feedback can help you tweak your product or idea before mass producing something that might fail.
If your target customer enjoys your service and offers good feedback, you know you’ve got a marketable product.
Find the Right Price
One of the most impactful product marketing tactics is pricing. Product price gives your product a status (affordable or high-quality), an audience (based on disposable income), and competitors. Use your product, audience, and competitor research to identify the perfect price point for your product, considering product costs and profit margins. Keeping up with market trends will help you determine if you should raise your lower your prices.
The key to determining your price is that it needs to sustain your business. If you price your products at a loss or an unsustainable profit margin, you will find it challenging to grow and scale.
There are other important factors that your pricing needs to account for, like how you’re priced in relation to your competitors, and what your pricing strategy means for your business and your customers’ expectations. But before you can worry about anything like that, you need to make sure you’ve found a sustainable base price.
The Product Manager Roles
The product manager is in charge of determining a product’s marketability and is ultimately responsible for its success in the market. In terms of determining the marketability of a product, the product manager’s responsibilities include product conception (product market and market research), product development, product launch, product sustaining, and product discontinuance.
Wrapping Up
People often laud entrepreneurial risk-taking. Indeed, starting a business requires a leap of faith. However, it is important to remember that people who took a risk and lost it all tend to keep their failures to themselves, and thus we only hear about those who have succeeded.
We recommend that you start your own business only when you’ve done your research and are confident you will succeed instead of underestimating the risk involved in starting a new business.
