How to Prepare a Plan to Introduce a New Product

One of the great challenges facing new product is that you must often battle for market sometimes with big businessmen who can afford to run more advertising, offer lower prices, and who are better established in the market place. There are some generally accepted strategies to use when you are facing challenge like this (tackling the market). These strategies have been used successfully by companies of all sizes to drive sales and carve out a sustainable position in the market. Those market strategies include the followings;

Step 1: 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? By crafting a focused Mission Statement and integrating it with your product, you establish the framework and foundation of your product introduction efforts. Think of this step like a compass; it won’t tell you precisely where to go, but it will tell you in which direction to head.

Step 2: 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.

Step 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. As a bonus, the insights that you glean from this step will prove invaluable as you develop your sales and marketing material, too.

Step 4: 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. Remember, while it may be tempting to conclude that some or even all of your competitors are “flawed” or “incompetent” or anything else negative, the fact remains that they are your competitors, and you have to respect them as such. Besides, you’ll have plenty of time to prove your product’s superiority once its strategically and effectively introduced!

Step 5: 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? Remember, even if you clearly see it as different than what your competition offers, don’t assume that your prospective customers will see things as clearly. So go beyond physical or specification distinctions, and anticipate how your product will be perceived by your customers and in your marketplace. When you do this, you’ll likely be surprised –perhaps even amazed –that you need to proactively make key adjustments to avoid having your product misunderstood by the very people you need to impress.

Step 6: Create your Action Plan - Here’s where you’ll take everything from steps 1 through 5 and put it into a structured action plan –which, in effect, will be a project. As such, make sure that you use robust and easy-to-use project management software here, so that you can clearly see how your action plan holds together –or how it doesn’t. Remember, 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. Creating your action plan with the help of professional project management software will help you objectively see whether you’re positioning your product to successfully make to market.

Step 7: Execute your Action Plan - After all of the hard work invested in the previous steps –especially step 6 –it’s time to hit the switch and execute your action plan. Again, be sure that you use the right project management software here to keep everything on track; especially as it relates to costs and resource allocation. It’s fine to spend a few weeks on market research or performing a S.W.O.T. analysis. But a few months? That may be far too long. If left unchecked, these mistakes derail and undermine your product launch goals.

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. So do yourself, your business and especially your future happy customers a big favor:  spend the required time on the steps above, and you’ll position your product to be a huge success.