There are three final questions that you must ask with regard to your product or service.
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The First question – Product and Service Public Offering, is there really a market for what you want to sell? Are there customers who have needs that are not yet being satisfied that you can satisfy with your product or service? Can your product or service be better in at least three distinct ways than anything else available to your prospective customers? It\’s amazing how many people bring a product or service to market without determining whether or not there are actually customers who will buy the product or service in that format that price.
The Second question – Product and Service Public Offering. Is the market large enough? Just because one or two people say that they would buy your product or service? This does not mean that there are enough customers to make this business a good use of your time and cash. Very often, friends and current customers will tell you that they would like you to offer a particular product or service. This can get you thinking about offering it, but you must be realistic and objective. You must determine that the market is large enough and growing for you to invest your time and money in this area, rather than somewhere else that may have a higher payoff.
The Third question – Product and Service Offering, that you have to ask with regard to your product or service is the market concentrated enough so that you can reach it with the existing marketing methods and advertising media available? There may be a potential market of hundreds or thousands for your product or service, but you have those potential. Customers are spread out evenly across the country. It may be cost-prohibitive for you to reach them. On the other hand, the internet may enable you to reach a narrow but deep market niche cost-effectively. But you must be sure that there are advertising and promotional media available that will enable you to contact prospective customers and convey to them that your product or service is available and that they should buy it, preferably immediately.
Fully 80 percent of all products and services in the marketplace today will be obsolete within five years and will be replaced with new products and services that are more satisfactory to the customers of the day. Fully 80 percent of new products and services brought to the market each year will fail. They will be the wrong products or services at the wrong prices for the wrong markets, at the wrong time, with the wrong competition. Products and services fail for a hundred reasons. This simply goes with the territory. You must be in a constant state of new product development. You must be continually scanning your marketplace and thinking of new, better, faster, cheaper, more efficient, or easier products and services for your customers of today and the customers of tomorrow.
In every case, you should look at your products and services as an outsider, as a management consultant that you have hired at great cost to evaluate your business before you become emotionally involved or excited about a product or service. You must be subjected to careful market testing, especially customer testing; your ability to select the right product or service, and market it at the right price to the right customer base and sell it in the right quantity is the key to your success in business. You must make every effort to make sure that you get this part of your business right and that you continually improve in this area.