Service, Product Development

As critical as it may seem at first glance, product development might not be something that is a priority for every business owner. For example, a company that specialises in selling machinery parts developed by other companies might not see the initial need for product development as they leave that process of innovation to those other companies that provide them with the products. Product development refers to the series of steps that businesses undertake to conceptualise, design, create, and launch a product for consumers to purchase. However, the aforementioned theoretical company might need to realise that product development is not just about creating consumable physical products; it also applies to digital products and services. Even if your company focuses solely on selling products developed by other companies, you are providing a service, and your service is an element that can be innovated and developed the same way that product development is carried out.

Thus regardless of whether your business chooses to focus on selling services or products, having research during development or as most call Research & Development (R&D) – allows your product to stay ahead of its competition by catering to consumers’ needs.

Why Focus on Development?

Service and product development is crucial because it serves as the means by which your business can innovate, adapt and grow to match evolving market and technical conditions, making your brand dynamically flexible. Firstly, this will help your company stay relevant in the fast-paced modern market shaped by digitalisation and globalisation, where technological advancements and consumer demands are evolving more rapidly than ever.

By becoming a leader in product development and keeping up with trends and changing values and beliefs, your company image will strengthen and become synonymous with innovation and forward-thinking, which will eventually lead to an expanding market share as your strong brand reputation allows you to penetrate global markets.

Finally, the added benefit of having product development is not just about the end product – it is an endeavour that involves the constant improvement of processes and technologies. This can lead to more efficient production and management methods which will be a boon to your company as you take each step towards the future.

What NOT to do in Product Development

With all the benefits that product development brings to the table, it may be tempting for businesses to rush headlong into the process, committing all their available resources towards product development to gain that crucial competitive advantage. This can prove to be a common mistake, as business studies have shown that maximising the resources that your company allocates to product development does not necessarily lead to optimal results. Product development relies heavily on the incremental creative efforts of product development employees who constantly go through the steps of ideation, testing and evaluation – a delicate process that can be prone to delays when too much is put on their plates. Furthermore, all the aforementioned projects will need to be managed – a task which cannot always be expected to be performed with 100% efficiency.

Product development is also not about developing a huge range of new products or a single product with an enormous range of features. Attempting to manufacture numerous new products at once will most likely cause your company’s production line to stall under the weight of creating so many new components at once while trying to cram as many features as possible into a single product is highly unlikely to appeal to your target customer – in fact, a deep dive into your target market will likely reveal that the dominant brand/product is the one that provides a simple and elegant solution that is focused on addressing your consumer’s main pain points.

When all is said and done, product development cannot be seen as something that will take care of itself and pay dividends for your business as long as you dump enough time and resources into it. Instead, it needs to be approached with the awareness that the success of your brand hinges on an astute understanding of the product development process, otherwise also known as the innovation journey.

Ideation

The first stage of product development is the generation and refinement of ideas. Ideas can come from various sources such as customer feedback, analysing competitors, and internal brainstorming sessions. At this stage, it is crucial to encourage creativity and innovation to generate a range of potential product concepts, which can then be refined into the early stages of a potential product or service.

Market Research

Alongside the ideation stage, a comprehensive market research strategy is invaluable as it will give you insight into how your target consumers behave and what they want from your product or service. Not only can the right market research framework feed you specific, targeted ideas for your product development, but it will also give you information that can determine whether or not a product is worth bringing into the market.

Conceptualisation

Once suitable ideas have been generated and refined, the selected ideas are developed into detailed product concepts. The product concept is defined at this stage, which involves coming up with the descriptions, features, and benefits of each potential product. In this stage, key questions must be addressed for the product development to progress further. Who is the target market? What features must the product have to be a success? Would consumers like this idea? Is the idea a unique one that isn’t already on the market? This is part of a process called idea validation (aka concept testing) where the purpose is to figure out if an idea for a new product or service is something that consumers would want, willing and able to pay for.

Design

With a defined and approved concept, the product can move to this stage where detailed product designs are created, including specifications and engineering drawings. In the case of a service, detailed plans for how the service will be carried out are created so that they can be envisioned and put into practice.

Prototyping

Prototypes or initial versions of the product are then created, keeping in mind the cost that it will take to produce the product for the end consumer. Using information obtained from earlier market research, there are many angles of costing that need to be considered, including how much the product will cost to produce, how much the consumer will be willing to pay for the product, and whether or not the product can be produced cost-efficiently enough and sell for a profit.

Answering these questions and performing multiple iterations on prototypes can help validate customer and market needs; if in food/beverage, it’s about getting the right formulation that meets what consumers want. This will also help you formulate your pricing and marketing strategy in the process as well.

Testing

This stage of product development is when the product is tested in different ways to ensure product quality and reliability. Some types of testing are straightforward such as in the case of new food products where consumers are given new flavours/types of food products to try and are asked to answer a survey which requires them to rate the product on a scale of 1-10 for different categories such as taste and appearance.

There is also concept testing where a product is physically tested then the idea of the product is discussed amongst the group with their personal opinion, to confirm if the concept is indeed valid for the target consumer. In some cases there is even home usage testing where a product is given to consumers for them to bring home and try for themselves over a period of time, to provide accurate feedback if the product is able to hold up under the rigours of daily usage and gauge if it helps to address their pain points during the usage period.

In the case of services, the testing phase ensures that the methodology and standard operating procedures that form the basis of the service are able to operate smoothly while serving real-life consumers, and allows for the troubleshooting and reworking of any stages or steps which fail to meet the customers’ needs.

It is also important to note that the testing stage encompasses elements of the product beyond the actual functions of the product itself. Packaging testing/evaluation is a key example of this, where consumers with different options of packaging and asked to provide feedback to grade the options in several aspects such as how eye-catching the packaging is, whether or not the packaging would be effective in convincing them to buy the product, and whether the packaging is convenient for the consumer.

Marketing Integration/Commercialisation

Before the product is launched, there is still work to be done in order to complete the product development process and position the product for success. This stage involves producing advertisements and promotions for the upcoming product, planning sales channels, and strategising how to position your product in the market amidst all the aforementioned activities.

Integrating your new product with the market can be done with targeted effectiveness by leveraging the data gathered from the market research stage at the beginning of the product development cycle and focusing on what position your brand should occupy in the market. This will enable you to position your product and brand in terms of costing, marketing and sales channels so that when the product development cycle is completed, you can launch your product/service with a price, look, and appeal that generates sales from target consumers and profit for your business.

In the earlier section, we mentioned the process of idea validation/concept testing as part of the product development cycle, but there needs to be a closer look at this crucial phase of product development as there are many misconceptions about idea validation and what it is actually for.

As mentioned earlier, the goal of idea validation is to figure out if an idea for a product or service is something that would help consumers while also being something that they would want to pay for. Without going through this process, it’s entirely possible that a business could end up committing a staggering amount of resources to an idea that would end up not appealing to consumers once it is launched to the market.

One thing to note is that simply carrying out idea validation does not guarantee that your product will succeed. Idea validation also does not serve the purpose of brand building or user acquisition, as the majority of users would not come to know your brand or be able to associate it with any of the ideas being validated during the process besides a very small number of early users that decide to stick with you after the validation process.

For idea validation to be effective and foolproof, you are required to validate everything about the particular idea. However, the three most important areas to focus on are as follows:

1. User/Product: Find out whether there are customers out there who need your product or service and whether they are willing to pay for it.
2. Market: Take a deep look at the market and understand who the current players are, how big the market is, and whether you can enter it and grab a share of the market for yourself. A successful, valid idea is one where the solution offered by your product or service meets the needs of the market.
3. Business model: The big question – how will you make a profit from your idea?

Finally, you must safeguard the accuracy and validity of your idea validation process by ensuring that mental biases do not affect the result. Humans are prone to bias the moment a question is posed to them, so be wary of anchoring a consumer by asking questions that could cause them to give a biased answer towards your product idea by the end of the process. Instead, ask big key questions (metrics) as early as possible to solicit purer feedback.

Minimum Viable Product – it might not be the most glamorous sounding term attached to the acronym MVP, but it will still serve as a highly valuable component in your product development cycle.

What is it?

The minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product created early in the product development cycle that is designed to have only the minimum necessary core features it needs to solve the problem that it is intended for. Depending on the industry, some organizations employ this approach when it comes to product development.

Similar to a prototype in that it is an early version of a product, the MVP can be thought of as a functional prototype or in the case of digital products/services a kind of beta test that can be offered to consumers to test the functionality of the product and collect feedback directly from users in scenarios that the product is intended for.

Why are they so useful?

Creating and offering an MVP to consumers can be highly beneficial to your business and can serve as a driving force in the product development cycle.

When it comes to innovation, not every business will have enough spare resources lying around to commit to designing and developing a new product from scratch, so businesses often rely on stakeholders and investors to buy in and provide funding for new projects. By having an MVP, a business can test its idea and build a solid case for the new product that can be pitched to potential investors. Furthermore, a functional MVP can also form the basis for a quick initial product launch when investors do buy in, allowing stakeholders to start getting a return on their investment without having to wait a long period for the final product to hit the market.

Building an MVP will also allow a business to test the concept of the product and verify whether there is a market demand for the product. By having a product that has just the core set of features, you can offer it to your target consumers and see if it resonates with them – do they want a product with these features and would they be willing to pay for it? What often happens is that testing an MVP with target consumers yields feedback that a business can use to adjust and improve on the product’s features, making it even more suitable for the target consumer down the line.

How does it work?

The general process of creating and building on an MVP is as follows:

1. Present a product that serves a target audience by solving a primary issue
2. Obtain feedback from the target audience
3. Present the feedback to the development team so that they have a better understanding of what to build.
4. Eliminate undesirable features while adding or improving on desirable ones.

The intention of an MVP should be to create something that is scalable and can be used to drive subsequent development and product decisions, as each iteration of the MVP is something that can be built on rather than being an isolated product. By going through the process of building the MVP, your business can continue to improve and scale the product up to serve more consumers while having increasingly desirable features.

What Not to do With Your MVP

Creating an MVP should not be about cutting corners to rush out a product as quickly as possible. Although an MVP can indeed help to make development more streamlined and cost-efficient, it should still be the result of a rigorous and well-thought-out testing and design process to create the most effective product possible to meet the consumer’s needs without any superfluous features.

An MVP is also not the same thing as a Proof of Concept (POC). An MVP is meant to be a usable product to be provided for consumers to use to test the viability of an idea and receive feedback from those users. A POC on the other hand serves the purpose of demonstrating whether a product is possible to develop or is feasible from an engineering or technical point of view.

With that in mind, remember that an MVP is also more than a rough draft. Although it will not include all the features that the final version of the product eventually will, it is still a crucial part of the product development cycle that consumers are meant to be able to interact with and fully utilise. The goal of MVP development is to produce a product that has the minimum set of features, but it cannot be of minimum quality. It has to be able to convince users of the value of your product so that they buy in and are willing to pay for the eventual final product.

Developing an excellent service or product requires a great deal of effort and resources, but simply devoting your company to developing a service or product does not guarantee success. Once the service or product is ready to be presented to customers, it comes to the marketing stage – an entirely different endeavour crucial for your service or product to generate profit for your company.

Marketing requires a strategy and framework separate from product design. It can be just as labour-intensive and costly; an ineffective marketing strategy can end up wasting all the processes we have covered so far and a great deal of your company’s resources. So, how do we ensure that a service or product is being marketed to the right people in the right way?

The answer lies in user personas as they present a more effective route to identifying key customers. They go beyond general demographics and provide deeper insight into potential customer’s pain points, desires, and values.

So What Exactly Are User Personas?

They are detailed profiles featuring specific characteristics that reflect a particular type of customer thinking and behaviour, as well as what that customer needs from the service or product. Each persona typically includes characteristics such as:

• User Demographic: The user’s age, gender, education, income level, and family status.
• Psychographic Statements: Statements expressing the user’s interests, values, motivations, and lifestyle.
• Behavioural Patterns: How the user interacts with products, shopping habits, and preferred communication channels.
• Goals and Pain Points: What the user hopes to achieve or what problems they are trying to solve with the product or service.

These characteristics are investigated through a step-by-step process which involves gathering detailed psychographic data on target consumers. An audience of target consumers is presented with various statements that fall into categories such as their attitudes towards life, values, and attitudes towards the product-related elements.

For example:

Attitudes towards life – “I want to be as successful as possible in life”

Values – “It’s important for me to be socially connected at all times”

Attitudes towards product-related elements – “I want a single device to fulfil all my working needs”

Those consumers are instructed to identify which statements they relate the most strongly to, and from there, your brand can further investigate to start building a user profile according to the characteristics of the consumers. By the end of the investigation, a user persona will contain information on what is most important to that type of user, including their motivations, goals and frustrations. The process of investigating and building these user personas can also reveal crucial data such as the population of a particular user persona in your market, and their average income, or even highly specific situational data such as the amount of hours they spend on the internet each week or the distance that they commute to work each day. This information can be used to appeal to these consumers and highlight your brand’s ability to address their pain points, which will further strengthen your eventual marketing strategy.

Why do User Personas Matter?

A common marketing strategy for most companies is to identify a target demographic of customers based on general factors such as age, race, profession, income, and gender. With the target demographic in mind, they then focus on marketing to that demographic. The fatal problem with this strategy is that it overlooks the fact that if you take a closer look at any two individuals in a certain demographic, they may have vastly different mindsets and desires even if they have all of the above factors in common. When customers do not respond well, as a result, the sales turn out to be poor, this could cause you to conclude that your service or product needs to be reworked, leading to additional wasted resources when the marketing strategy was actually what needed to be addressed.

How do User Personas Help?

Creating user personas can help your company understand your potential customers and group them into segments, allowing you to align your service or product with the needs of each group. 

For example, let’s look into a company that manufactures different types of laptops. In this instance, they may come up with a batch of user personas that they wish to market to, which includes the following 2 personas:

 “Young Entrepreneur” – Small business owners under the age of 35 who are looking for affordable and portable devices that can be easily used for a wide range of work tasks on the go. 

 “Corporate High-Flyer” – High-ranking executives over the age of 40 who don’t mind paying a premium for reliability and high-end designs/materials. 

With these personas, the company can develop tailored products and highly targeted personalised marketing campaigns that appeal to each segment, increasing the likelihood of engagement and sales.

In the instance of the aforementioned laptop company, after identifying the persona of “Young Entrepreneur”, they could tailor their marketing efforts to highlight their brand’s low-cost laptop models which still offer reliability, portability, and versatility at a competitive price point. Meanwhile, they could also target the “Corporate High-Flyer” with a separate campaign that shines the spotlight on a range of top-tier models with extensive features and premium build quality. By focusing on the values and needs of these distinct user personas, the brand can not only capture their attention but also strengthen brand loyalty amongst these users by demonstrating that they understand the customer’s wants and needs.

One more crucial characteristic of user personas is their preferred communication channels. With this information, companies can focus their resources on the channels most likely to engage their target personas such as social media platforms, email, or traditional media. 

For example, the “Young Entrepreneur” might be more savvy with social media, spending more time on platforms like Instagram and TikTok to actively promote their business, which in turn makes those the best channels to reach them. Meanwhile the “Corporate High-Flyer” may be more active on LinkedIn and prefer email newsletters. 

User personas go beyond helping companies sell products; they can enable your company to strengthen long-term customer relationships by showing that you understand the specific pain points of each persona. Keep in mind that building effective user personas is not a one-off process. It is a process requiring continuous refinement as customer preferences and market dynamics shift. But by revisiting your personas and adjusting them based on feedback, new data, and evolving trends, you can continue creating experiences and content that make customers feel valued and understood.

Besides thorough investigation and development of user personas, it is also important to consider strategic product positioning to craft a strategic and effective marketing plan. 

Strategic product positioning involves shaping how your service or product is promoted in a competitive market, focusing on the distinct features of your service or product and the benefits it can bring to your customers.

The main purpose here is for your company to take matters into its own hands by determining how your service or product will be perceived by potential customers who are viewing your service or product in comparison with the competitors available. By clarifying how your product meets customer needs or solves specific problems, you can craft a compelling brand narrative that differentiates your brand from your competitors. 

You can look into how Apple leveraged strategic product positioning with the iPhone over time. When Apple first launched the iPhone, the brand highlighted the unique features of the device that made it stand out from others on the market, such as its proprietary user-friendly interface, seamless integration with other Apple products, and premium build quality. The way Apple positioned the product was to promote it as more than just a phone – it occupied the position of becoming a lifestyle product which over time became synonymous with innovation, quality, and affluence. This targeted messaging aligned with the brand’s reputation for being at the forefront of technology and design, creating strong brand loyalty amongst its customers.

This strategic approach helped Apple differentiate itself in a highly competitive smartphone market and outlast major competitors such as Samsung. Over time, the iPhone’s positioning as an exclusive, high-quality product allowed Apple to maintain a large, loyal customer base and dominate the high-end smartphone segment, with customers being more than willing to pay for the premium price point in exchange for the convenience and prestige of being an “Apple User”.

The 4P’s of Marketing

Product, Price, Place, Promotion. These 4P’s are the foundational pillars of a successful marketing strategy. Each “P” represents a core aspect of marketing that your business can leverage to appeal to your target audience and convert customers.

Product

The “Product” is the physical good or service that your brand is offering to the customer. As we went over in the earlier part of this process, your product must be developed while holding the following questions in mind: What need does the product fulfil? Who is the product’s target audience? What makes this product unique compared to what others offer?

Price

The price that you set for your product must be carefully considered in order to appeal to your target market. Both low and high price points have their own pros and cons depending on your competitors and target audience, which we will cover more in-depth later on.

Place

This is how and where the service or product is distributed or accessed by your customers. Distribution channels can range from physical retail stores to e-commerce platforms, with some channels being more effective than others depending on the service or product you offer and its target audience. Effective distribution requires understanding where the customer shops and choosing locations or channels that maximise both visibility and convenience while also being appropriate for the service or product in question.

Promotion

The tactics your brand uses to advertise your product or service, communicating its benefits and features in a way that resonates with potential customers and convinces them to make a purchase. 

In-Depth with 2P’s – Product Testing and Pricing Evaluation

Product Testing is a vital process that should be conducted whenever your company wants to introduce a new or improved product to the market, i.e. how to ensure we develop the right product that consumers want. This could be a brand new unique product that your company has never offered before (e.g. a cola company creating an orange-flavoured drink), or it could be a new version of an existing product (a diet version of that company’s cola), or even an existing product with an improved/revamped blueprint or formula (a re-launch of the company’s classic cola with a ‘new and improved’ taste). In any of the aforementioned cases, product testing is important as it provides a definitive answer to whether customers would favour your product over the competitors.

One way of conducting product testing is through a central location test (CLT), which is an offering of Oppotus. A group of target consumers is invited to a specific location to test the product and be interviewed to see what they think about it. By performing a CLT you can get direct and accurate feedback from your potential customers as they will be testing your product in a controlled environment that prevents external factors from influencing how they experience and evaluate your product. 

During a CLT, you can set specific parameters and conditions for how each customer tries your product. For example, if you want to test how your new cola beverage compares against a competitor’s beverage, you can control the temperature of the beverage being served to the customer, the packaging that it is served in, and the size of the serving that the customer gets to taste. By making sure that these conditions are the same for both your beverage and your competitor’s beverage across all the tests, you can minimise the chance that the customer’s experience of the beverage is affected by any external conditions or biases. After the customer has tried both products, you can ask them a range of questions to evaluate what they think of your product in comparison to your competitor’s. For example, you can ask open-ended questions such as “What do you think of the beverage’s flavour?” to get their detailed thoughts, or you can ask them to rate your product on a numerical scale in different sensorial categories such as “sweetness”, “colour” and “aroma” so that you can have data to make a direct quantitative comparison between your product and your competitor’s. 

With the results from your CLT, you can then take steps to improve your product and even conduct another CLT with the improved product to obtain an additional round of feedback. Through multiple iterations of this process, you can continue to refine and improve your product until you reach a point where your product is undoubtedly more to the liking of your target customers compared to your competitor, maximising the likelihood that your product will be successful once it hits the market.

After you have developed a product that your customers want, you will need to conduct a pricing evaluation in order to decide on a price that will make your product as attractive to your customers as possible. An effective way of doing this is by using the Van Westendorp pricing model.

The Van Westendorp model takes into account the fact that real-life customers will have certain perceptions about what prices are fair and expected for particular products. In this model, a product that is too expensive will not attract customers, but a product that is priced too low will also end up driving away customers. This contrasts with the standard economic theory which assumes that a cheaper price results in higher demand from customers. Thus, within the Van Westendorp model, there is an “acceptable price range” where your product can be viewed as acceptably cheap or acceptably expensive by customers.

By applying the Van Westerndorp pricing model to your particular product and its target customers, you can determine the customer’s willingness to pay at each potential price level. You may choose to set prices low to gain market share, or you may choose to go with the premium pricing route to make your product more exclusive. However, you still need to carefully consider the price range of your competitors. Pricing a product too high will discourage purchases, but pricing it too low may also cause decreased sales by giving your target audience the impression that your product is of inferior quality. Therefore, to identify a successful price, you would need to ask yourself questions such as: What is the price range of your competitor? What is the price range of your target audience? What is the lowest price you can set without causing your customers to assume that your product is of inferior quality? What is the highest price you can set where your customers will still consider buying your product? What price best fits your target audience? 

Your Marketing Mix

Successfully utilising the 4P’s is done by crafting them into your “Marketing Mix”. Your Marketing Mix refers to how you combine and incorporate each of these elements into your marketing strategy to leverage their potential benefits in a way that maximises your brand’s ability to reach customers and convince them to purchase your service or product. 

The best way to approach this is to view the 4P’s as an interconnected system that supports your overall marketing goals. With the knowledge of user personas, you can fine-tune each of the 4P’s within your marketing mix to their optimum state for each target persona, marketing the right product to the right people at a price that appeals to them, in a place that is accessible and convenient for them, using promotional methods that will catch their attention and communicate your service or product’s features and benefits.  

Volume Projections

Another important aspect of service and product development is developing a marketing strategy for what you have produced gauging the market demand and potential sales of that service or product. By leveraging past sales data, industry trends, and consumer behaviour, your company can forecast the number of sales that you are likely to make over a particular period. This will help your company plan better inventory, allocate resources, and schedule production efficiently. 

What Happens Without Volume Projections?

Without accurate projects, it might be difficult for your company to align the supply of your product with the demands of your target audience. By properly gauging how much your target audience is willing to purchase, your company can produce just the right amount to meet the demand. On the other hand, if you start production without gauging the potential sales, you might overproduce and end up with excess stock and wasted resources, or underproduce and end up missing out on potential sales.

Volume projections also highlight peak times when your service or product is most in demand. This can help your company plan big marketing campaigns during high-demand seasons to optimise reach and engagement and ensure that your production matches the demand during these periods to meet the needs of customers as well. Without volume projection, your company may not be able to keep up with seasonal trends, failing to capitalise on periods where your service or product is in demand; or you may even end up being inefficient all year round, spreading your resources too thinly across periods where your target audience isn’t necessarily looking for your service or product.

You’ve developed your service or product, created user personas to help you craft marketing strategies and settled with a finely-tuned marketing mix to make sure your service or product is being marketed effectively to its target audience, and you’ve successfully launched to paying customers…but it doesn’t end there.

Product development does not end after launch. Rather, it’s an ongoing process where you must continue to iterate and improve your product based on the market’s response to your product and any customer feedback that you receive. The time after a service or product is launched is just as crucial, if not possibly more so than the time leading up to it. After all, you can prepare as much as possible to maximise the chances of a successful launch but that does not necessarily mean that the service or product will end up being profitable in either the short-term or the long-term. There’s always the possibility that unforeseen circumstances or changes in the market that are outside of your control could affect how customers respond to your service or product. 

Monitoring Your Product Development Life Cycle

Identifying where your product lies in the product development life cycle is crucial when it comes to maintaining your business’ market share and profitability in the long term. To do this, you must monitor the progress of your product by collecting information about its performance amongst customers and analysing it to see if it is performing according to its specifications and marketing strategy.

The goal of monitoring is to improve your current product and any of its future iterations along with the overall product strategy to achieve better sales as time goes on, but what exactly should you monitor and track for the sake of further iteration? The following is a list of metrics which are important for most companies to monitor. Depending on the needs or size of your company, you may start by monitoring a select group of metrics which you feel are most important, and build on them incrementally as your brand grows and your goals evolve.

Revenue: Besides just counting your revenue, the best practice is to track it monthly, quarterly, and annually to monitor the performance compared to your forecast or volume projections for the period.

Product Growth: Keep track of your growth rate and how it compares to the prior year. It’s important to watch out for any periods in both the prior and current year where the growth rate changes significantly. By comparing these periods, you can identify if there are any seasonal changes throughout the year which will lead to increased sales or a slowdown.

Market Growth: Keep an eye on how fast the overall market is growing or declining so that you can adjust your strategies accordingly.

Competitor Growth: Pay close attention to how your competitors are performing. Identify which competitors are getting the best results and figure out the best ways of formulating a strategy to bolster your own brand’s performance.

Price and Sales Levels: Keep track of your pricing throughout the year and identify any variances in the volume of your sales. This will allow you to determine what to address in situations where your revenue is lower than expected during a certain period. In some cases, your revenue may be low due to discounts or new pricing regulations, but there may be situations where you have sold less than anticipated and need to make adjustments to rectify it.

Product Margin Performance: How much profit is your service or product making with each sale? You need to ensure that you are able to continuously provide your service or product to meet the changing demands of your customers while ensuring that each transaction is profitable.

Cost Areas: Take careful note of the expenses that your company has to cover in order to produce, market and distribute your service or product. You should always have an accurate knowledge of the cost breakdown for each unit of sales and what your fixed and variable costs are. Knowing all of this is essential to track your product margin performance as well.

Customer Satisfaction Indicators: Don’t just look at the revenue numbers, keep a watchful eye on complaints, customer satisfaction scores, order fulfilment times and whether or not customer support enquiries are being answered in a timely manner. Keep in mind that customer feedback – both positive and negative, is one of the best ways to drive your product iteration and marketing strategies.

By consistently monitoring the above factors, you will be able to identify where your product currently stands both within the overall market landscape as well as within its product life cycle, which will drive your further product iterations and ongoing marketing strategy.

Constantly evaluating market trends, adjusting product features, and optimising your marketing strategy based on consistent, careful analysis is ultimately the key to success. It is an ongoing process that may have started with the early stages of product iteration but will continue to challenge your brand as you grow and attempt to reach more and more customers.

If you would like to dive deeper with us and uncover the best possible service and product development methods or marketing strategies for your brand, feel free to contact us at theteam@oppotus.com